


Hau

by OrionLady



Series: In the Foxhole [2]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: (or lack thereof), Affection, And they get those hugs!, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Boundaries, Bread making, Danny Needs a Hug, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Food Issues, Gen, Halloween, Healing, Learning To Communicate, NCIS: Los Angeles characters, Nightmares, Platonic Relationships, Protectiveness, Recovery, Steve Needs a Hug, Tenderness, Trauma, Trust Issues, all the metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:15:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 34,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26010256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrionLady/pseuds/OrionLady
Summary: You’d think, after working ten years with a guy who never shuts up, there’d be nothing left to learn. Steve certainly claimed to know everything. Then Danny goes and does something crazy like adopt thirteen children and a deformed sea turtle. Not to mention the ‘quest of lies’ Charlie incident.A glimpse into recovery, domestic life, trust issues, and bread making for Steve and Danny.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett & Danny "Danno" Williams
Series: In the Foxhole [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1887817
Comments: 93
Kudos: 131





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This started out back in June like, “oh hey, I should write a little oneshot to see where the boys are.”
> 
> *gestures to 30,000+ words of my usual nonsense* Sometimes a family is me, my never ending head canon scenes, and a cello, and that’s beautiful. Hope you all enjoy this sequel piece! It's more from Steve's perspective to balance out Danny's in the last fic. 
> 
> Bon apetit!

‘There’s not many people I’d honestly say I don’t mind losing to  
But there’s nothing like doing nothing with you.  
Dumb conversation, we lose track of time,  
Have I told you lately I’m grateful you’re mine?’

“Nothing” ~ Bruno Major

Steve will never admit it until his dying breath—probably because Danny will make _sure_ it is his last, if the truth ever slipped out—but he loves the feel of Danny’s skin.

It’s a fact he’s never had the chance to discover until recently, spending long nights curled up behind him.

This habit is not a salacious or dirty thing, just that when headaches barge in spiked armies across his skull or therapy is too long to be comfortable, when he feels small or the sound of his father getting shot won’t stop playing on repeat, Steve wraps both arms around Danny’s belly, fingers skimming over his wrists or a bare hollow of skin where his T-shirt rides up, and the world quiets. Completely stops. His pain melts away in micro flashes, as if Danny’s very presence is a balm. There must be an artery just above Danny’s belly button with the way it thumps soundly under the side of Steve’s thumb.

If anything is at fault for getting him hooked, it’s that night in DC.

Danny had crawled into the hotel bed with him and for all Steve’s refusals, he didn’t protest, mostly because he was grieving and a little buzzed at the time. They’d lain apart while falling asleep but towards morning, Danny’s shivering woke him, looking all pathetic and cold curled up like that, back to Steve, and Steve had just…reached over.

Even under all the layers, he’d found the one little sliver of skin that was always poking out near Danny’s stomach.

At Steve’s touch, he’d instantly calmed. You’d think Steve’s palm was a radiator for how fast it worked. The shivers stopped and Danny’s sleep deepened. Steve had held himself perfectly still, lest even the slightest movement wake him up.

It became a habit, and as such Steve only does it when Danny is already fast asleep, lips slightly parted, curled up in a compact little ball on his side like a cat. Sometimes huddled up together is Steve’s favourite part of the day, Danny’s breath pushing his elbow up and down. Contrary to how they’re teased, having another man sleeping in his bed has been an adjustment for Danny, and so Steve is careful not to push too much, to ask for too much, at least when he’s awake.

Truth be told, Steve has learned a lot about Danny over the past few months. For how vocal Danny was these last ten years, Steve thought he knew everything about the man he possibly could. He claimed so, even. But since moving to LA, this massive house Hetty gave them out of honour and memorial for someone she lost, he constantly surprises Steve, every single day.

Or right now, for instance.

Steve can’t sleep, vaguely on edge after a phone call with Mary, despite what a pleasant conversation it was. He watches shadows play across the wall, from a palm tree by the streetlamp outside their window, and it’s not quite hypnotic enough to put him to sleep. After years of injuries and field medicine, Steve can sense that his own blood pressure is higher than normal, a tick above comfortable. Nothing alarming. Just that relaxing is difficult at the moment.

He’s lost in memories of his eighth birthday, of all things, when suddenly Danny sucks in a funny breath between his teeth.

Steve doesn’t move save to tighten his grip, because he knows most of Danny’s recurring nightmares and this is probably just one of those. There’s the usual gamut, complete with specific motions: whimpering when it’s anything bullet wound or torture related, coiling up even smaller when it’s Matty, rolling over with a clenched jaw if it’s one of those Grace-and-or-Charlie-gets-hurt dreams.

Danny’s ribs twitch.

Steve lays there, frowning now. He doesn’t recognize this silent tension at all. Keeping his grip close, he plays with the hem of Danny’s shirt in one hand, the one between Danny and the mattress, and pats his chest with the other. His hope is that it will quiet Danny’s mind without waking him. They’re both blessedly well rested now, but once in a while they lose a night or two to those lurking mental phantoms. Danny more so than Steve in that department and Steve aches at the thought of him losing any more.

Danny’s body doesn’t circle up as it is prone to sometimes, knees touching Steve’s wrists, but he breathes out in perfect stereo for if he’d been punched, and it’s his head that curls low. Steve’s nose, always buried in Danny’s hair or his shoulder, meets empty air. Danny’s breathing comes out in uneven spurts which don’t sound healthy at all.

Steve is bewildered enough at this point that he nudges Danny’s chin where it’s disturbingly close to the back of his hand. Hot breaths puff along his skin.

 _Hey_ , he thinks, _you’re suffocating yourself. Stop that._

Danny doesn’t, of course, though he pushes back into Steve’s chest a tad more in response to the touch. His heels have gone oddly boneless, bumping against Steve’s knees. The pads of his fingers are sticky with sweat when Steve grabs at them.

Then Danny _stops_ breathing.

Steve is up on one elbow so fast it dislodges the blankets off both of them.

_No no no no no—_

He pats Danny’s chest with more urgency this time, knuckles to his breastbone. Danny’s brow furrows in his sleep, eyelashes starting to move.

“That’s it, come on.” It’s been fifteen seconds since Danny last took a breath and while that isn’t a long time to go without air, comparatively, it’s downright terrifying for Steve. He doesn’t want to hit Danny’s sternum, doesn’t want his touch to be associated with pain after how much damage was inflicted to it nearly five months ago, but he will if this escalates. “ _Breathe_ , Danny.”

His harsh voice ends up doing the trick. Danny jolts awake with a gasp, clutching at his chest. Since Steve’s hand is still there, he mostly claws at the back of that.

“Easy, Danny. Easy…just take it slow.”

Fingernails bite into Steve’s skin but he doesn’t even flinch, too focused on the piston-like inhalations now racking Danny’s torso. They look almost…painful in their intensity. At least he’s breathing deeply, diaphragm heaving up and down.

“Vest,” Danny gets out.

“No, Danny.” Steve leans over him, trying to check his pupils in the dark. “You’re not wearing a vest.”

“Y’ took it off.” Danny coughs. “Right. Yeah.”

Despite adrenaline positively singing through his body, Steve feels he’s about two steps behind whatever thought process Danny has latched onto, as if _he’s_ the one groggy with sleep and nightmares. Gently, careful not to dislodge the hand Danny is currently strangling, Steve uses the arm underneath Danny to turn him onto his back, and this seems to help. Danny settles in under a minute, although he never normally sleeps or rests like this, preferring to be on his side.

“You’ve got the monopoly on scaring me, huh?”

Danny doesn’t reply, just blinks up at Steve for a while. Steve couldn’t even bet a buck on what he’s thinking right now. Danger averted, Steve has time to run what he knows of Danny’s family history through his mind. Could this be an extreme form of sleep apnea? Did his ribs heal at a wonky angle and are now applying adverse pressure to his lungs?

“I’ss…w’re home.”

Steve sags on his right elbow at the rush of affection this disoriented statement slams him with. “You got it, Danno. We’re home. Can you take a full—slower—breath in for me?”

Danny does so without questioning or any visible sign of pain, neither of which is exactly reassuring. Especially in light of Danny’s track record about hiding things. Using the hand trapped under Danny’s, he runs a quick circle with his thumb.

The sensation surprises Danny, who jolts again and lets go. His nails leave half-moon indents in Steve’s skin and yank out a few hairs as they flee.

“Sorry,” he says.

Steve just keeps stroking Danny’s sternum. The belly button heartbeat is under his forearm now, wailing away at a zippy clip.

“The…” Danny runs a hand over his face and lets it linger across his eyes. A crude but effective hiding place. “‘S the weirdest thing. I’ve never, uh…I’ve never had nightmares about the…”

He can’t seem to get it out. Rather than be pale or shaky, the typical state after one of these episodes, Danny is instead worn, drained, and a little delayed on the uptake of information. Steve softens at the sleepy, small sight of him at once.

And it hits him in one blank smack.

“The Sarin gas. That’s what you were dreaming about?”

Danny hesitates, then nods. He peeks out from behind his palm. “Sorry if I woke you.”

Two apologies in as many minutes. That never bodes well.

“You didn’t,” Steve assures him. “I couldn’t sleep, actually.”

“Well, it’s contagious.” Danny’s joke lacks heat, mainly since he’s still blinking up at the ceiling with obvious confusion that he can, in fact, breathe just fine. That he’s not about to asphyxiate at the drop of a hat. “Why would I dream about something from so long ago? We went fishing on the pier today. Who dreams about almost dying after catchin’ puny fish on the pier and listening to your terrible Bon Jovi impression?”

Steve shrugs. The motion jostles Danny a bit, who pats his own ribs and is, again, faintly bemused by the absence of a vest. Steve himself had many late nights after that incident, his eagle eyes trained on the way Danny breathed—or didn’t—while out in the field. How he didn’t let Danny get close to a body bag for two months after he returned to work. The scared, please-fix-it look in Danny’s eye, that day he collapsed against the house, still haunts him.

“Who knows,” Steve says, shaking himself out of the memory. Although Danny would most likely have woken up on his own, it spooks Steve that Danny might have stopped breathing altogether if he hadn’t been here. This could have ended a lot worse. “Sometimes your subconscious just feels safe enough to be all, ‘hey, that sucked. Let’s think about how much that sucked.’ Doesn’t always mean anything. You good now? You in any pain?”

Danny seems to fully realize just how bow-string alert Steve is, his own heart rate elevated. He reaches up and taps Steve’s cheek. “‘M okay, you worry wart.”

“Yeah, sure you are.”

Steve shuffles off the bed and opens the third dresser drawer to dig around their sinkhole of sweaters. It’s September, but he still retrieves a red US Navy pullover and offers it to Danny. Anyone else would be too warm for such a thing. Steve, however, knows Danny and his need for security well—Danny takes it without missing a beat.

“Feel like a teenager,” he mutters, while sitting up and tugging it over his head. It’s too big on him, like all of Steve’s clothing, yet somehow Steve still finds that pieces of his wardrobe mysteriously disappear after a tough day. Danny melts back onto the bed, features loose in relief. “Wearin’ your stuff.”

For the sake of his immediate health and safety, Steve refrains from commenting on the fact that Danny _looks_ like a teenager when he’s engulfed in a billowy sweater like this, frizzed up tight, eyes drooping with sleep. Hands invisible under five inches of fabric because he’s too tired to roll them up.

Steve might not know everything about Danny, but he’s learning.

He knows that Danny prefers his grilled cheese with bacon, that he likes green grapes better than red, that he has an itemized sock collection with ridiculous designs on them (mainly because they keep bleeding into Steve’s sock drawer upstairs), that when no one’s looking, he’ll squish sand between his toes into little molehill shapes; Steve now knows that Danny considers breathing a privilege and, even at an unconscious level, he still thinks about that early days case.

People make the mistake of doubting Danny because of this smallness, the shape of him deceptive.

In reality, Danny is a tenpin of pure lightning. Hit his buttons just the right way and you get burned or, in Steve’s case—energized. They’ve been compared to fire and water, Danny the crackling flames and Steve the slippery, cool substance that calms Danny down, but this is not even close to true.

Steve was a dry, rotting forest for as long as he could remember. Then Danny came along and set a brush fire to his soul, scorching up the dead bits inside: then protecting it until new growth could flourish. Now his heart is something verdant and alive, arid and wind-swept and charred by the coals of Danny’s refusal to give up on anything. Even if that something is Steve himself.

It’s why those two months travelling the world felt so empty. Why he’d heard Lou’s panicked rambling on the phone and _run_ to the airport—because he was rotting, dying inside all over again.

“Y’ stayin’ up?”

Steve rouses from these thoughts to see Danny’s hand search along the empty side of the bed. His fingers peek out from the sleeves.

The soupy tone indicates Danny is barely there, already half asleep and probably half dreaming too. At least his feet stay exactly where they’re supposed to, tucked up tight to his body. No wandering anymore. Steve gets a little choked up, honestly, at the peace of this moment and the simple sight of Danny wearing this raggedy sweater that kept Steve warm on those long nights before BUDS.

“S’eve?”

“I’m here.” At the concerned tone, Steve crawls back under the covers, facing Danny this time. “And I realize that my arm probably made you feel trapped in your sleep. If it was heavy and triggered that memory, I’m sorry.”

Danny’s eyes are closed, so his hand misses Steve’s cheek on the first pass by and swats his nose instead. Steve smiles. The second attempt is successful, barely. His fingers stagger over Steve’s cheekbone, catch at his earlobe, and then backtrack for his jaw. Another light pat follows.

“I’ss not your fault,” says Danny, with hazy feeling and emphasis. A broken record.

He impresses this upon Steve _constantly_ , seemingly out of the blue—

_“Not your fault your mom chose her ‘country’ over you.”_

_“Not your fault I got shot.”_

_“Not your fault you were raised by wolves.”_

_“It’s not your fault that you needed to retire, at least for now. That’s a healthy thing.”_

_“Not your fault that Joe died.”_

_“Babe, please, it’s not your fault that you have awful taste in cartoons.”_

—Danny says it like it’s going out of style and Steve needs to hear it, every single time. Even the stupid ones Danny blurts just to make Steve laugh.

The fingers go lax and Steve snatches Danny’s hand before it can fall to the bed between them. He holds it while tracking Danny’s breathing slip away into true rest. Steve knows he’s well and truly under when he squeezes said lax fingers and all Danny does is sigh in his sleep.

Steve still can’t drift off. This time, however, he doesn’t mind keeping his eyes open for a while. He watches Danny and, yeah, he knows a lot—but he’s also got a lot to learn.

* * *

“Steve? You alive over there?”

“Mmm.”

Right now the world is golden and toasty, as it should be. Steve lays on his back, on the hardwood, right next to their sliding back door. With it being sunset on another cloudless day, there is a perfect slice of light falling through the glass that hits him square across the face and chest, a natural heater that he wants to luxuriate in for as long as he can.

Socked feet shuffle closer and then stop next to his hip. A small toe digs under his side to steal some warmth, then a few more. Danny wriggles his feet.

“Didn’t make it out for that run in the end?”

“Mmm,” says Steve again, because he’s sleepy and lazy and doesn’t feel up for exercising today. He’d put off his run all day, even this morning, for the sole reason that he could and he wanted to push his boundaries like an eight-year-old with a suddenly increased curfew.

He’s used to the lives of people resting upon how in shape he is, ready at a moment’s notice to run ten city blocks or jump off a high surface and land safely or free dive in the ocean without an oxygen tank. Now that it’s just recently occurred to him that he doesn’t need to be prepared for worst case scenarios at all times, he’s learning to enjoy the free time and not push himself so hard.

Danny extracts his toes to sit in the recliner, his noisy crunching the tracker Steve uses to follow his progress around the living room.

“Bagel?” he asks.

Danny finishes chewing, only to take another bite and talk around it. “Yep. From that Jewish bakery downtown.”

“Mmm.”

“Aren’t you a veritable fount of eloquence today.”

Steve doesn’t rise to the barb—at least Danny is eating. Sometimes his lean appetite worries Steve, how on hard days he’ll lose interest in food after a few bites. There’s no predicting the spells, the way Danny’s face will lose colour and he’ll suddenly drop whatever food is in his hand, back onto the plate. He’ll prepare it, sure, a whole gourmet feast, but _eating_ is a whole other ball game.

The rustle of paper precedes Danny resting his ankles on Steve’s. With his body and limbs so warm, the fabric makes his skin prickle in buzzing circuits.

“What’s a nine-letter word for ‘working well in harmony?’”

Steve doesn’t open his eyes, not that he needs to for him to know that Danny is doing the newspaper’s crossword section that Isabelle leaves on their doorstep every morning because she’s hopeless at puzzles, though she schools them at anything art related. Pictionary has since been banned from games night, especially after she teamed up with Grace and whooped them silly.

“Harmony?”

“Yeah. That’s all the clue says. I’m finished except for that one. I didn’t get a chance to fill it in this morning.”

“Is this a music thing?”

“Don’t think so.”

Steve mulls it over. While he does, Danny shifts. There’s a hole in the heel of his sock, creating a tiny window of skin that Steve can feel against the bridge of his foot.

A slow smile creeps over his face. “Symbiotic.”

There’s the scratch of a pencil. Danny mutters under his breath before saying, louder, “Well whaddaya know. The army man knows his vocabulary.”

“Navy.”

“Gesundheit. Symbiotic…what a weird word.”

Steve can feel Danny’s pulse now, muted as it is. It has that slow but peppy quality Danny-at-rest always does, reassuring in its marching pace. Their heartbeats spiccato against each other and Steve’s belly thrums with contentment. “Weird indeed.”

* * *

“And what, pray tell, is this?”

Danny looks up from his beach chair at Steve and his surfboard. He has to squint against the noonday sun. “It’s a Switch. All the kids use them, apparently.”

Steve plants his board in the sand, just watching Danny flick the thing back and forth. Chirpy little sounds, puckish in their cheer, filter up from the console.

“So you had to buy one?”

Danny presses a button on the back and the screen flashes. “No, I didn’t _buy_ one, Steven. This is a loaner.”

“A loaner? What for?”

“To play video games on, what else? You’ve got sunstroke already.”

“No, I mean, why play _now_?”

“We all have our secrets.”

Steve snorts. “Yeah right. We live in a house together and I know every single embarrassing story from your childhood. I’d know if you had a sudden hankering for video games.”

Danny has the audacity to wink at him. “Steve?”

“Danny?”

“Go have fun falling off your board.”

“You’re insufferable.”

* * *

Grace is of no help in this video game mystery whatsoever, Steve is dismayed to learn. She comes over on Saturday and listens to Steve’s plight over homemade crepes for lunch, while Danny is outside talking to Isabelle in the driveway.

“And he uses it a lot?”

“Every day!” Steve laments, licking whipped cream off his fingers. “I’ll catch him muttering at it over breakfast or in the car! Can you believe that?”

“I haven’t heard anything from Danno about why he’d suddenly learn how to use a Switch.” Grace hums a thinking sound, the same one Danny makes, in between bites of kiwi. She swallows. “Maybe it has something to do with feeling old. He’s trying to reclaim his youth.”

Steve barks a laugh. “Please let me tell him that.”

Grace holds up her fork in a philosophical pose. “Ah, but if you do, he’ll never spill the beans. And then where would we be?”

“You’re so right, Gracie. Cheers to that.”

They tap their respective glasses of orange juice with a conspiratorial smile. Their plates are almost cleared when Grace sits up. “Ten bucks says I can figure out what he’s up to before you.”

“Now that’s not a fair bet.” Steve points at her. “All you’d have to do is ask and he’d just tell you.”

“Mmm, I don’t know. He’s being pretty cagey about it.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “He _thinks_ he’s good at keeping secrets, but time will tell. You’re on.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danny is hunched low to look into Steve’s eyes, his own bright and open. There’s no hiding the tears now.
> 
> One of them falls and Danny grimaces in a searing kind of compassion, pure and plain. Like Steve’s tear had the nerve to stab him. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. C’mere.”

‘When everything around us changed, we felt okay.  
No learning curve could ever bend us too far out of shape.  
When darkness was the price of light, we weren’t afraid.  
For the time we’ve spent was more than worth  
Any interest that we’ve paid.’

“Learning Curve” ~ Sleeping At Last

Three months is enough time, it turns out, for sea turtles to return and lay yet _more_ eggs on their beach. Not the same sea turtle family, but a new female. Steve does some research on it and comes to the conclusion that the first batch back in June was normal and that this nest is, well, late.

“We all bloom at our own pace,” says Danny, defensive while he puts both hands on his hips and looks at the bluff of sand hollowed out behind Steve’s chair. Steve is honestly impressed a full grown sea turtle managed to wriggle back there. Now that he’s looking for it, he spies a two foot wide drag mark and flipper dashes in the sand too. “This mother just wanted to wait until the traffic weaned out. Can’t blame her for that.”

“We’re a hot spot nursery,” Steve deadpans.

Danny throws him a don’t-toy-with-me look, eyes flashing, and Steve fights hard not to grin. If it’s weirdly important to Danny that they protect these measly fifty eggs (also not normal; most turtles lay over a hundred) then so be it. He raises his hands in surrender and lets Danny put up a cardboard wall around the eggs, fussing over it with a proud expression.

Maybe he takes a picture of the pose. Or five. What Danny doesn’t know won’t kill him.

So now they’re a bone fide conservation site. Steve only knows this because he calls into a local endangered species agency and they email him a truly massive print out of what to do and what not to do if the eggs hatch prematurely. The gist, he gathers, is that the best thing he and Danny can do is leave them alone. They’ll have to take the cardboard away in a month to allow the babies ocean access.

“Let him have this,” Grace says one day, standing with Steve at the windows. Together they watch Danny tie up an umbrella to shelter the eggs, so birds can’t peck at them. “Sometimes Danno just needs to watch things grow, to thrive.”

She would know, after all.

The summer had been a blissful one, once Grace was done of her classes. Lazy days reading on the beach, surfing with her, driving around Long Beach, or watching her learn how to cook—all of it had been exactly what both Danny and Steve needed. Quiet, close. Steve finds himself prizing quiet now, more so when his family is within easy reach.

Danny confessed one night, nearly in tears, that he hadn’t had this much uninterrupted time with his daughter since she was in third grade. He misses Charlie too, but apparently Rachel’s job involves travel so she’ll be dropping him off more than they expected, once the Christmas holidays start.

Grace returned to school two weeks ago and while she still hangs out with them on weekends, the suddenly reduced hours and her absence have taken their toll. Danny pretends to be unaffected, but Steve definitely spent a few days in the beginning eating breakfast alone. Only for Danny to wander in later with bloodshot eyes.

Steve said nothing on these occasions, save to shove a plate of eggs in front of his sad form. A little burned, just how he likes them.

Their sleeping-at-the-drop-of-a-hat episodes have stopped almost altogether, for both of them. Steve hasn’t felt this well rested in decades. He gets to sleep in as long as he wants, eat what he likes, and try new activities. He finds he has more energy for things like skateboarding and finally playing that guitar and weird card games Danny teaches him, of which Steve is pretty sure he’s made up half the rules so he can cheat. Isabelle has also been teaching him how to make bread—this one less successful than his other endeavours.

So it’s easy to forget, to put reality on the back burner.

Danny comes in from a ‘swim’ one day (consisting mainly of Danny bobbing in the shallows while he sunbathes—Steve would make fun of him if he didn’t know the painful connotations behind his wariness) and watches Steve measure out flour in preparation for kneading while he towel dries at the patio door.

He’s finally felt comfortable not wearing a shirt this past month, now that he doesn’t look so skeletal. It was strange at first, seeing Danny in jeans and loose shirts all the time, no tie in sight, but it’s growing on Steve. He glances at the bullet scar, like he always does.

“Which batch is this?” Danny asks.

“Just white bread, keeping it simple.”

“Steve.”

Steve sighs. How Danny can wrap up a question, a reprimand, and nosiness all in one word is beyond his comprehension. “The other three burned or didn’t rise, alright? This is attempt number four. Today.”

“I see.” Danny is the picture of nonchalance. He gets all the sand off his feet and then throws on a hoodie. His board shorts have almost dried, but not quite.

“Aht!” Steve points a finger at him. “You’re dripping.”

“Is someone touchy about their bread making skills this afternoon?”

“I’m irritated and covered in flour. You wanna go there?”

Danny just smirks at him while wringing out the hem of his shorts. Then he steps back inside. “Points for persistence, babe. You haven’t given up after a week of this.”

“I refuse to go back to Isabelle and tell her I can’t do this. It’s _bread_. It shouldn’t be so hard. Half of bread making is just patience and waiting for it to rise, right? And I’ve been waiting for _hours_.”

Danny rests his elbows on the island to lean in over the bowl. “Not to cast your superior culinary skills into question, but is the dough supposed to be this…porous?”

Steve glances into the bowl and sure enough, holes are forming along the top, like Swiss cheese in fast forward. That doesn’t seem right. Isabelle’s recipe sounds so _simple_. Just a few easy steps and some elbow grease.

Danny must catch his bewildered look because a grin stretches across his cheeks. His eyes glitter. It’s the same look he gives Grace when she’s just done something adorable, only with more teasing. “Steve, I think I know what your problem is.”

Competitive by nature and only fueled by nurture, Steve’s eyes look wildly around for anything he might have missed. Sugar, yeast packet, water, flour, a pinch of salt…where did he go wrong? He just bought the flour last week so it can’t be old. It’s not lumpy or grainy.

“Don’t tell me,” he says, when he spots Danny about to open his mouth again. “I’ll figure it out.”

Danny lifts up both hands and heads off to shower. “Just come to me if you’re stuck.”

“I’m not stuck, alright?”

“Of course you’re not.”

“I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“Never said you didn’t, babe.”

Steve mumbles a rude word and pokes at his dough.

* * *

So it’s easy to forget that life still happened, that it doesn’t stop knocking just because peace and its security is the bouncer now. It was even easier, at the start of the evening, to blame a tidal curl of queasiness in his stomach on Danny’s risotto.

He shoves the dish away from himself. “Just not feeling very hungry, Danno. It tastes funny.”

“Screw you,” Danny says, while gesturing at Steve’s half empty plate. “My cooking is delicious.”

And Steve smiles, because causing Danny’s bluster is always fun. Particularly when the words are said in jest. It’s easy, like everything else these days.

But then his cranium joins the tempest, a heavy and thundering cloud behind his ears and throat. He manages to sustain his end of conversation over dinner. They end up slumped on the couch in front of a show Steve doesn’t recognize and an abandoned game of cards.

“Fifty bucks says you’re cheating.”

“They’re real rules, Steve.”

It takes another hour and darkness falling outside, but the timing is flawless, and Steve would be grateful if he wasn’t feeling so miserable—Danny dozes off right when Steve’s stomach gives a protesting lurch. The motion has been present all day, he’s simply been able to ignore it. The sensation is uncomfortable without being urgent.

Or it has been so far, anyway, until a snake feels like it’s crawled around the back of his ribcage and died there.

Steve hops off the couch, pleased to note Danny’s eyes still closed, and races for the downstairs bathroom. His bare feet leave sweat imprints on the hardwood. He nearly skids right past the door in his haste, vaulting to his knees.

He makes it over the toilet with no room to spare. The snake is most definitely _not_ dead, and it writhes around his torso, squeezing, _squeezing—_

Barely anything comes up, but that doesn’t stop his body from trying to expel even imagined substances. Steve’s eyes cinch shut at the gag reflex, the pain this causes his entire abdomen. The floor is cold under his knees in terrible contrast to hot throbs lancing across his skull. Ice cube sweat beads along his hairline. It isn’t _fair._ None of it is fair, that they’ve overcome so much and things like this refuse to stop hounding at their heels.

He hasn’t felt this miserable since that gut punch night on the side of the road with Danny, a mental picture that still hurts to think about. How he’d almost driven right past the parked car before seeing a crumpled figure in the dirt, barely breathing.

One of the first things their therapists recommended, right off the bat, was that each of them find separate communities to feed into. This was partly a bid to break some of the co-dependency—not that it’s working—and give them like-minded people who could relate to their individual traumas. So two or three times a month, Steve lets Sam Hanna drag him to the VA, a SEALs group, where other people who’ve blown up whole compounds can actually understand the horror movie images his mind provides him with some days. 

Danny’s version of community is to mother hen the children on their street, along with going to an injured cop and grief support group.

And at a certain level it’s effective. Because as much as Steve loves Danny, there really are things only another soldier can fathom. You can flesh it out to a civilian all you want, but they’re not going to get it until they see a man holding his own severed arm while running away from an IED. Steve has even worked up the courage to call Catherine, just to chat on days when being touched or loud noises push him close to a nervous edge. She keeps offering to go for coffee but he knows he won’t, that it’s over. He thinks she knows too.

Even with all this, the logic of healthy mental choices, these fellow SEALs who can understand war, sometimes…sometimes all Steve wants is just Danny. Danny may not always have a personal frame of reference for the outward shell of his life experience, but he knows the inner core of who Steve is better than anyone.

And right now. Right now he doesn’t want combat brothers. He wants his home.

As if this thought is a magical summons, a hand appears between Steve’s shoulder blades. The warmth of it makes him shudder.

Danny says absolutely nothing at all while Steve vomits, save for a few murmurs in his throat. Sympathetic noises that bring tears to Steve’s eyes.

Once the episode finishes and Steve flushes the toilet, Danny doesn’t berate him about medication or masking symptoms or joke about how his risotto couldn’t have been that bad. He must sense the trembling fragility in Steve’s chest, for the hand moves up to the back of his neck, Danny’s squatted knees pressed into his side. This contact dispels any lingering spasms.

He’s hunched low to look into Steve’s eyes, his own bright and open. There’s no hiding the tears now.

One of them falls and Danny grimaces in a searing kind of compassion, pure and plain. Like Steve’s tear had the nerve to stab him. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. C’mere.”

Steve could fight it, could stand up and rinse out his mouth and argue that he doesn’t need smothering. He’s done so plenty of times before. But the tone, the way Danny says that soft word in a completely un-kidding way and tugs at the nape of his neck and smells like tomato sauce and _home_ , completely unravels Steve in one breath. He lets himself be turned and pulled close, face buried in the shoulder of Danny’s sweater.

It actually _is_ one of Danny’s own jogging fleece sweaters this time and therefore it smells like him.

Steve cries some more over the inherent comfort in that, over how wretched his body feels, over the injustice that for one zen summer he forgot about things like radiation sickness and bum livers, over the way Danny rubs his back, over how he stretches higher to try and reach all of Steve so he doesn’t have to bend down. It’s uncomfortable, scrunched up together on the floor, Steve on his knees and Danny perched over his heels, but there’s nothing more grounding right now.

Steve sobs a little in relief.

“Hey, hey.” Danny’s body reacts to the sound, knees tightening on either side of him. “Don’t run away from me when you’re hurting, huh? I thought we covered that.”

Another muffled sob replies.

“Good. Okay, we’re okay.”

They’re not, but it’s Danny’s tender voice that counts.

It took only one week of working with him, all those years ago, to realize that while Danny’s mouth never stopped, cherry bomb words of grumpy acid sometimes, his hands never lie. Not even once. His body language may have be sharp, but he’d touch Steve’s chest, in the middle of ranting, and just like that Steve would understand that the words were borne of worry and not anger.

“You half-baked bastard!” he’d yell.

A hand would press at his cheek. _Don’t scare us like that. I care about you_ , it said.

Since their retirement, Danny doesn’t rant and rave so much. Maybe it’s the lack of stress or Grace so close by or maybe even the sense that there’s always someone he can count on, but whatever it is, words have stopped being a smokescreen. Something of the coiled spring inside Danny’s core has bent apart into relaxed arabesques that Steve is still tracing the new shape of.

More tears fill Steve’s eyes and at this point he’s not even sure why, since the spell has passed aside from a lingering headache and hollow stomach. Snot and some drool have definitely been added to the cocktail on Danny’s shoulder by now. He just shakes and wishes it would go away.

Danny doesn’t notice. He’s too busy weaving healing fingers through Steve’s hair and over his shoulders, the other arm braced around Steve’s side to keep him from swaying. They chase away his headache.

“I gotcha, Steve,” Danny whispers into his hair. “We’re not rushing, alright? Take all the time you need.”

They stay that way for a while and at long last it hits Steve—they have all the time in the _world_. Nobody is demanding anything he can’t or doesn’t want to give. Life happened, but it’s a past tense thing. Danny’s hands scream this truth better than anything he can say.

“‘M tired, Danny. Soul tired.”

“I know you are.”

Steve tries to slow his weeping so he can feel the familiar lullaby of Danny’s heartbeat. In the same way that Danny apparently needs to feel Steve breathing or he loses focus, Steve needs the ping of Danny’s radar pulse to find where he is. But the sweater is too thick. Steve’s brow furrows against fabric.

That won’t do.

Without even thinking, his right hand unlatches from the self-hug around his ribs to fish for Danny’s stomach. It’s rote habit at this point. There is nothing easier than sticking his hand between fabric and skin and finding the artery point.

Or it _would_ be.

Before his fingers brush up the hem all the way, Danny startles at his touch and jumps back. Steve removes his hand at once, guilt-stricken even before he sees the whites of Danny’s wide eyes and slack jaw.

“Danny, I didn’t mean—” Steve stops himself when he feels the tension in Danny’s hands on his back, which haven’t let go despite the sudden foot of space between them. They’ve been through a lot, manhandled each other in life-and-death situations to the point where they’re bereft of personal space, yet Steve recognizes that this does not give him a right to do whatever he wants. “I’m sorry. I should have asked first.”

Danny is still staring at him, not lost for words but clearly doing some mental math before using any. The balled up fingers release, a little, and Steve holds his breath.

“It’s fine. Just wasn’t expecting it,” says Danny, quiet, like he’s trying to sound normal.

His voice’s waver makes Steve nauseous afresh, a different kind of choke in his throat. He dares to shuffle closer and is pleased when Danny doesn’t move away. The action does, however, propel him to start talking immediately.

“Where do you keep your radiation and anti-nausea medication?”

Steve’s face falls at the way he won’t meet his eyes. “Danny—”

“I’ll go grab it, along with some water.”

“Danny, hey.” Steve latches onto his wrist before either of them can get up and Danny’s back to stiff. He looks like a piece of driftwood about to snap. “Talk to me.”

Danny is quiet a moment longer, gaze to the side. He looks almost…shaken, a sight Steve hates at once. What he hates even more is that he put it there.

“I don’t think…I can’t give you that.”

Steve runs a hand down his face, reddening. He’s bungled this up. Big time. “No, no. Nothing like that, Danno. Sometimes…uh, on nights when I can’t sleep or I get auditory flashbacks…”

He’s come a long way, he really has. It’s taken years of grit and therapy and exhausting work for Steve to learn that it’s okay to verbalize emotion, that it’s not a weakness. That asking for _help_ is a normal human process.

Here, looking into Danny’s earnest eyes, it’s hard all over again.

Steve takes a deliberate breath in. He nods to himself—just get it over with. “Sometimes your heartbeat lulls me back to sleep. It’s comforting.”

There’s a long pause, sated only by cars passing and the low, distant drone of the TV playing out in the living room. It’s not awkward, but it is one of the first times Steve can’t interpret what it means. This kind of viscose silence hasn’t happened in ten years.

“My heartbeat.” Danny’s voice is unreadable.

Steve points to his own abdomen. “You’ve got an artery or something right here. I can feel it.”

“You do this when I’m asleep?”

Steve hesitates. “…Yes.”

“Oh.” Danny blinks and his whole body unwinds in one pop. He removes his hands, worth it in exchange for the faint smile he gives Steve. “You’re such a drama queen about hiding what you need. Here. Knock yourself out.”

And he lifts up his sweater a few inches, exposing a swatch of belly button.

Steve knows what it is to be loved, of course. He found his ohana _also_ through grit and exhausting work, has experienced so many second chances and kind gestures that he’s not sure what to do with them all. People have been careful with his heart, have loved him through their unflagging presence and hugs and plates of food. To be loved is a privilege he’s never taken for granted.

But this is the first time Steve ever gets a glimpse of what Danny is always telling him with his words: that to be loved is Steve’s intrinsic right as a human being. He doesn’t have to earn it, to lead or save lives in a bid to dust off his heart and be ‘worthy’ of their affection. He _deserves_ love, simply because he’s himself.

For one inaugural moment…Steve starts to believe that. Nobody has loved him with such power or force as Danny Williams in this clumsy, transparent moment, by offering Steve exactly what he needs even at the cost of his own comfort.

Danny’s hands once again tell the truth.

Steve swallows, not that it does any good. More tears get lost down his cheeks, but they aren’t cold and aching. These ones thaw, leaving trails of catharsis on their merry way.

He wraps both arms around Danny’s back and draws him to his chest. Danny lets go of his sweater to reciprocate the hug. This time it’s Steve who adjusts, bends so that Danny doesn’t have to stretch. Steve still feels sick and worn, but right now it doesn’t matter. Right now his chest is glowing from the inside out and he wants Danny to understand that he sees. He gets it. He’ll never stop being amazed by all the little ways Danny sacrifices to love him.

“Y’alright? This a good hug?”

Steve pulls back a bit. “Yeah. Well, no. But it’s not so bad now.”

Danny doesn’t call him out on the lie. He just waits patiently while Steve reaches for his stomach, slow in case Danny changes his mind. Steve doesn’t miss the way he starts, less violent than before, but clearly getting used to someone else’s hand. It reminds him of all the cruelty that’s been inflicted to this spot. Danny’s been struck along his torso more times even than Steve.

The thought burns through Steve’s limbs, a righteous fury that he can’t dwell on for too long or he’ll do something rash.

“I feel like a pregnant lady,” Danny jokes.

It’s a good thing he does, because it yanks Steve back from an irate spiral. The swirl of homicidal anger inside him fades, replaced by a searing fondness. Especially at the way Danny is forcing himself to sit still while Steve soaks in the slowing down _th-thump_ heartbeat against his palm.

“Danno?”

“Mmm?”

“Thank you.” 

Danny catches one of Steve’s tears on his forefinger. “You’re dehydrated and a little loopy. But you can take my pulse anytime you need, you goof.”

Though it’s a tease, the clear permission makes Steve cry again.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What’re you staring at?”
> 
> Steve’s eyes follow Danny as he comes around to sit next to him at the island in the usual morning ablution. “You.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is late! Life is a little crazy right now but I have the whole fic finished and am simply editing at this point. Thanks to everyone who left such lovely comments! :)

‘You are the crystalline that keeps me from my ruin,  
You’re the true north pointing back home—  
I just want to hear you whispering that you still trust.  
I promise I won’t let you down.’

“Clear” ~ Needtobreathe

Something else Steve learns—just because Danny’s not technically a detective anymore, doesn’t mean he stops being the most observant man Steve has ever met. His investigative brain, reading people, is apparently hardwired above and beyond a job role.

It takes Danny all of a month to learn the names of both of their neighbours on this side of the street, along with some kids down the block.

And they’ve never even met.

It’s a freaking miracle, in even Steve’s opinion, since Danny swears he didn’t root through their mail or anything. He explains that there are a lot of other identifying clues but Steve is suspicious.

The house to the left of their driveway, a dark wood style bungalow with lots of shutters and solar panels and satellite dishes on the roof, belongs to some nineteen year old genius who works in Silicon Valley named Logan. He’s reclusive, never seen in broad daylight.

(Danny still can’t figure out his last name, but he’s working on it.)

Steve finally spots him one morning while rolling out the blue box using his longboard. It’s early, barely past sunrise, when a slender but round boned kid comes out of the adjacent garage, dragging a recycling bin to the curb just like Steve. His hair is dark, jet black, and he’s wearing flannel sleep pants underneath an oversized _Duran Duran_ T-shirt. His eyes are espresso brown, almost the same shade as his hair.

Belatedly, Steve realizes that he’s frozen in surprise, a pitiful attempt not to scare off this rare, programming creature.

Logan just looks at him, assessing, and then nods. He points to the board. “Nice trucks.”

And then he’s gone. Two words and a nocturnal, filthy rich teenager are all Steve knows of this particular neighbour.

 _Jerry would love him_.

The house on their _right_ is wildly different, filled with so much crème decor and bay windows that it gleams in the sun. It’s two and a half stories tall, a smidgen bigger than theirs, and a green convertible is usually parked in the lot, seldom driven.

It belongs to an older couple in their late sixties, retired doctors, not that you’d know based on how active they are. Allen and Diane Murray travel all over the continent to raise money for an inner city non-profit. On the weekends they are home, Danny claims, they work at a soup kitchen downtown. They’re modern day warriors for the needy. Steve likes them with the same quirky fondness he likes Logan, despite having only seen the Murrays from a distance, her white tresses streaming from the open top of the sports car as they drive away yet again to the airport.

Because neither of their immediate neighbours use their beaches very much—read, _at all_ —Steve and Danny are alone for a full quarter mile, and that feels right too. The lack of foot or boat traffic in their area is probably why the sea turtles liked it so much in the first place.

Steve is standing at the east window over the kitchen sink one morning, trying to keep toast and some diluted lemongrass tea down, when a little kid, maybe seven years old, trundles past on his hot pink bicycle. His helmet has flames on it, which makes for an interesting sight.

“That’s Brady,” says Danny without missing a beat while he beelines for the coffee pot. “He lives four houses down from Isabelle.”

Steve hides his grin by bringing the mug to his lips and taking a sip. “I swear you’re making it up at this point.”

“Oh yeah?” Danny smirks at him and Steve knows he’s lost even before Danny winds open the window. He calls loud enough to be heard but not enough to scare the kid. “Morning, Brady!”

Brady stops pedaling to brace his feet on the ground. He waves. “Hey, Mr. Williams!”

“Watch for cars, alright?”

“I will!” And then Brady is off again. They watch him lurch along the sidewalk, still trying to get the hang of steering. The thing is beat up to high heaven, either a hand-me-down or a testament to Brady’s terrible cycling skills.

Danny cants his head. “I met him a few days ago, after he scraped his knee and I gave him a band-aid. His mom needs to buy him shin guards, at the rate he keeps falling.”

“You’re hopeless,” Steve decides.

“If you mean hopelessly perceptive, then you bet I am.”

Steve just grins some more. He doesn’t think the true meaning of this sentiment would be appreciated, that Danny is a hopeless softy of a man who can’t help parenting any child within eyesight.

And what do you know—other people have started to pick up on this observant facet of Danny too.

Two days after the vomiting-slash-hug-fest, there comes a sharp knock on the front door. Steve flinches from where his head is pillowed on his arms at the island. His stomach has been churning all morning, coupled with a dull throbbing in his temples. The meds are helping, but not by much. For once, he’s looking forward to tomorrow’s doctor’s appointment, hopefully to up his current dosage. Danny soothes him with a low murmur too fast to make out and a hand along his shoulders.

“I got it, Steve,” he says, louder.

When he opens the door, Isabelle immediately starts talking, wringing her hands. “I’ve been robbed! The yard’s a mess!”

“Whoa, whoa.” Danny’s posture straightens in alarm. “Were you there when it happened?”

“No, I woke up to it!” Isabelle doesn’t come inside, even though Danny sweeps out an arm in offer. Both men scan her for injury but thankfully find none. She _is_ however, rather disheveled. Though she’s dressed for work, her blazer seems in danger of slipping off on one shoulder and her long brown hair is falling out of its ponytail. “I know you’re not an investigator anymore but do you think you could come take a look?”

“Oh yes he still is,” Steve mumbles. “Regular Columbo over here.”

From the eye Steve has peeked out over his elbow, he sees a funny ripple run through Danny’s hand. He suddenly struggles not to laugh—if they didn’t have polite company, Steve knows he’d be flipped the bird. With feeling.

Danny regains his footing. And his professionalism. “Wouldn’t the LA PD be better suited to handle this?”

“Well, see…” Isabelle blushes, a sudden spritz of colour along her cheekbones. This is intriguing enough that Steve finds the energy to sit up. “The thief didn’t take anything of high monetary value, just that it’s an heirloom in my family. I don’t think the cops would care.”

Steve doesn’t know whether to be bothered or flattered by this statement: either she doesn’t consider the two men law enforcement as part of their identity anymore or if she does, they’re somehow above the regular cut of police. He goes with honoured and apparently so does Danny, by the smile hidden at the corner of his mouth.

“Alright, let me grab my shoes. Steve, you good here for a bit?”

Steve salutes him in proper Navy fashion. “Go get ‘em, Nancy Drew.”

This time, just as Danny closes the door, he definitely flips Steve off.

Though the nausea won’t abate, Steve allows his curiosity to lead him off the stool and over to the sink window. He watches them cross the road, Isabelle’s hands flying while she narrates. True to form, Danny nods along the whole time, even when her helpful commentary devolves into rambling as suspect statements often do.

There are a disjointed few minutes while Isabelle points to the scene of the crime. It doesn’t take long, however, for Danny to track across to the front lawn, eyes on the ground. He even kneels down to look at something in the grass.

The sight is so aching, familiar, that it winds Steve. He’s watched Danny examine evidence like that for over a decade now, and it’s a sure fire amidst the icy compartmentalization that used to dictate Steve’s life. Here he is, emotional about something so mundane that he has to lean on the counter top.

For the first time since they moved to LA, Steve wonders what his father would think of his life now. Would he shake his head or smile? Steve likes to think he’d be proud, to see his son get up in the morning for something he wants and not just civic duty. To have people he loves with a ferocity that rivals armies and be loved in return.

 _Not_ for the first time, Steve wishes John had lived to meet Danny and the team. They’d have gotten along in ways that make Steve dizzy to think about. But then…well, then he’d never have met Danny at all.

Isabelle waits patiently for Danny to finish making a conclusion about what he sees. Whatever was stolen does not warrant gloves or tweezers to handle. He points out something on the ground to Isabelle, circling his left hand in the usual gesture of, ‘I’m explaining something I’ve already deduced.’

And then, to Steve’s utter shock, they cross the street and march on over to Logan’s house.

“You really are Nancy Drew, Danno.” Steve mutters this while shifting to the door’s inset window and watching Danny knock on Logan’s door.

It’s a fifty-fifty shot of whether Logan will answer at all, given that it’s ten in the morning and there’s a very good chance the kid is actually half bat.

But answer he does, looking groggy and befuddled by the sight of neighbours on his doorstep. A conversation ensues that Steve desperately wishes he could hear, mostly because Isabelle keeps patting Logan’s hand like he’s a wayward puppy and Logan’s eyes widen and Danny’s lips are twitching in that way he does with Charlie when he’s trying to be stern and not grin.

He’s got one arm propped on the doorway and the other in his pocket, so Steve gathers that whatever is going on is pretty much handled.

Logan disappears inside and comes back out with a towel-wrapped shape. It’s oblong, a funny size for an heirloom. Isabelle tries to peel back the cloth but Logan stops her, hand up in a warning. Whatever he says makes both Danny and Isabelle take a full step away from it.

Steve would be worried if Isabelle didn’t all at once invite him back to her house. They walk away, Logan still holding…whatever it is…and Isabelle’s expressive hands at it again while she talks.

What happens next will remain a mystery because Steve has to hoof it back to the island before Danny can catch him spying. He plops back down with a banana, methodical in his peeling like he’s been sitting here the whole time.

Danny sees through it instantly when he enters. He rolls his eyes. “Creeper.”

“So, Poirot, you solved the crime?”

“You bet we did.” Danny sits next to him at the island and steals a chunk of banana. Thrilled to see him eating, Steve holds out the rest. “Turns out Logan spotted the heirloom on his way home last night—he grocery shops at two am, go figure—and it was the perfect size and material to use as a conductor for his latest project. He ‘borrowed’ it off Isabelle’s lawn.”

“A conductor.” Steve isn’t quite following. “Like…to strengthen electrical or wavelength signals?”

“This is my life now,” says Danny, deadpan. “Yay for me. He had to ground the thing before handing it back.”

“I thought he was a computer scientist, a software developer.”

“So did I.”

“How’d you know it was him?”

Danny finally gives in to the smile. “There was a shoe imprint in the muddy spot around Isabelle’s sprinkler. As someone who wears Converse religiously, I knew the tread when I saw it. It was a funky size too, small but wide. Had a hunch. Logan’s last name is Coppola, by the way.”

“Huh.”

“I know.”

“And Logan fessed up, just like that?”

“He felt bad,” Danny explains, lobbing off yet more of Steve’s banana. “Logan’s got a sketchy history of kleptomania—something to do with a criminal father who taught him how to pick pockets young—and Isabelle is incapable of holding a grudge, so. She said, and I quote, ‘you need more positive role models in your life, Logan.’ I think she’s taking him back to force feed him cinnamon buns.”

He tapers off with a stuffed-cheeked, “Unbelievable, right? People are too nice for their own good sometimes.”

Steve side eyes him. “Yeah, isn’t it crazy?”

“I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like that this is our version of crazy now.” Danny completely misses the jab and Steve loves him a little more for it, for his heart, for his generosity, so strongly that it burns in his stomach.

“Me too…hey wait a minute. So what did Logan steal?”

Danny finishes swallowing and the way he draws it out tips Steve off. He smirks, meeting Steve’s eyes. “A solid, two foot high copper garden gnome, enticing tall hat and all, passed down from Isabelle’s grandmother.”

A beat of stunned, perfect silence reigns, so all consuming a seagull is audible way down the beach. They stare at each other.

And then there is no controlling the sudden upwell—

The laughter bursts out of Steve in wide gusts, making him tear up, loud and long and a little bit wild. He curls over himself, hands covering his face in a futile attempt to shore the broken dam. Steve laughs so hard he almost throws up again. Danny swears at him, at garden gnomes the world over, that he has gone from an illustrious career solving homicides and attempted terrorist activity to heirloom abductions. Until there’s nothing left for Danny to do but join Steve. His giggles counterpoint the buffeting sound of Steve. Their voices fill up the sunlit kitchen, cheery and obnoxious and full of life, and suddenly…

…Suddenly Steve doesn’t have to wonder if his father would be proud.

* * *

Though Steve is typically awake before Danny to go for a run or swim, it’s an unwritten rule that Danny covers breakfast while Steve is in charge of making supper. Sometimes they flip this around, but it works better if Danny gets the kitchen to himself while Steve is out and Steve cooks later, when Danny’s more awake to babysit his attempts. Lunch consists of grazing and stinking up the kitchen with burnt loaves of bread.

(So many loaves of deflated bread.)

He comes in from the ocean one morning, not bothering with a shirt other than the towel around his shoulders, and smiles when he sees Danny in an apron. He’s in full swing, rushing around the stove and fridge. Dishing out banana chocolate chip pancakes.

“You smell like fish,” says Danny.

Steve doesn’t banter back, save to pilfer Danny’s mug of coffee and warm his hands with it. He sips at the cooling dark roast.

And Danny doesn’t even complain about it.

Something flutters in Steve’s gut, a moth drawn to the light source of his happiness. “To what do I owe this treat?”

Danny shrugs. “Guy can’t make a big breakfast?”

“Sure, sure.”

“You gonna police my cooking habits now?” Danny presses.

“No, it’s all good. Smells great.”

Steve watches him spoon out blueberries, mango, and even—gasp—pineapple. Yogurt and strips of bacon are neatly presented on the side of a decorative plate Steve wasn’t even aware they owned. He’d buy it if Danny wasn’t studiously avoiding his eyes. Not in a shifty, ‘I’m about to drop some bad news on you’ way, but in a shy, ‘don’t make direct eye contact or I’ll crack’ way.

It’s neither of their birthdays. Not a sad day. Not even the anniversary of them moving here. A just-because day, then. Danny _does_ look a little bloodshot around the eyes, attesting that he probably missed a bit of sleep. If there’s more to it, Steve is content to wait and find out.

“You want any juice?” Danny asks.

“I’m good. Coffee’s enough.”

Danny hums while dishing out three pancakes for Steve, though Steve notes he doesn't set aside any for himself. He’s rolled up the sweater sleeves but they keep slipping down, brushing his knuckles and wet from slicing mangos. The humming continues, a song he used to sing to Grace when she was little.

And Steve thinks perhaps he was designed for this specific moment, encoded down to the last atom in meticulous, byzantine fashion, his whole life lying in wait for the day he watches Danny flip pancakes while wearing Steve’s Navy hoodie in their house, no bullets in sight. It’s beautiful. There’s no other word to adequately describe the simple, overarching moment.

_Beautiful._

“What’re you staring at?”

Steve’s eyes follow Danny as he comes around to sit next to him at the island in the usual morning ablution. “You.”

Danny reddens, all the way up to the tips of his ears. He plants a hand over Steve’s face and playfully shoves him away. “What a schmuck.”

* * *

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s good exercise, only it has the added benefit of throwing off any surveillance.”

Steve squints at Callen, then Sam, for help. “Surveillance?”

“Don’t look at me.” Sam jostles his shorter partner. “He’s a special kind of crazy.”

Callen, tootsie pop in his mouth, doesn’t even glance away from his phone where the pair lean against Sam’s Hellcat. Sam is currently folding origami out of the tootsie pop wrapper Callen handed him, with absolutely zero explanation, when he first arrived. Skateboarders and beach bums meander around them on the boardwalk. Steve stands in front of the pair and marvels that they’re _both_ a special kind of crazy, like an old married couple with none of the tax benefits.

He can hear mental his mental Danny— _“How hypocritical of you, Steve.”_

Not for the first time today alone, he wishes he had the real Danny with him. Mental Danny isn’t nearly as much fun. 

The trio met here for lunch, which Callen showed up late for because he had to finish ‘zig zagging’ with his girlfriend.

“Let me get this straight.” Steve folds his arms. “You and Anna go for a jog together, split up, and then meet back halfway through?”

“Until the last ten minutes,” Callen finishes. He uses his tootsie pop to gesture. It glistens in the relentless LA sun. “Then we split up again and arrive back at the apartment separately. That way our movements never follow a consistent pattern. We call it zig zagging.”

“For funsies,” Sam goads, with a wrinkle of his eyes and nose.

Callen licks serenely at his pre-dinner snack, tongue an electric purple. “Sure, big guy. For funsies.”

“You’re impossible.”

Callen grants them their first smile of the day. It’s indulgent and a little impish. “I’m sorry, Sam, I can’t hear you over the sound of the actual harbor seal who’s your personal pet. Especially on nights you cook tuna.”

Sam just shakes his head, though he’s not fooling anybody. He meets Steve’s eyes with raised brows. “You see what I have to put up with? Not that you can’t relate. You’ve got a stubborn urchin for a partner too.”

Offering a concession nod, Steve can’t help but think that Sam has it backwards— _he’s_ the wound up one in this relationship, with Callen an eerie sort of calm in every situation. He reminds Steve of a monitor lizard or an alligator, controlled and poised until the moment is right. And maybe just the tiniest bit crazy after all.

Unlike Sam and Steve, with SEAL backgrounds, or even Danny as a cop, Callen is a category all by himself, even though most of his friends are technically federal agents too. Something about him is an agent in name only. Callen bears the true embodiment of a spy, down to the socks he puts on in the morning.

Steve will catch him watching someone on the boardwalk, his eyes unblinking while they narrow in. Callen almost stops breathing when he does this, the way his gaze darts across the minutiae of a person. Then he’ll laugh and say something to Sam along the lines of, “That guy is allergic to popcorn. Weird, right?”

And he’s never wrong—case in point being the way he immediately knew Steve was trying to learn bread making the instant he laid eyes on him ten minutes ago, despite the fact that there’s no flour or yeast on his clothes at all. It’s frankly a little harrowing. Maybe he and Danny have something in common after all.

Sam finishes folding the wrapper and hands it to Callen, who presents it to Steve. An origami bear sits on all fours in his palm. “Sorry Danny couldn’t come. Maybe next time?”

“Yeah.” Steve strokes the tiny ears, admiring Sam’s delicate handiwork. “Yeah, he’d like that. He had another therapy appointment downtown as he…he doesn’t sleep so well sometimes, and nightmares have been acting up lately.”

Sam and Callen sober in a single-minded, unison gesture. They glance at each other, and Steve appreciates all over again having friends who understand what they’re going through. They’ve been there. And then some. Scars peek over the collars of their shirts, the distinct skin discs of old bullet wounds, slashes, and a jagged star shape along Callen’s sternum that speaks of a torture-related battery burn.

Callen taps the little gift. “Bears are symbolic in Russian culture, you know. They’re the one animal that can be either the villain of a story or the prized hero—sometimes they even switch halfway through.”

Steve peers down at him, wary of where he’s going with this.

“Bears represent the struggle inside of a person to do what’s right.” Callen’s smile is back, commiserating this time and full of an old, tired ache. “They have the power to overcome.”

It strikes Steve suddenly that Callen is _letting_ him see his emotions and this should be treated for the monumental gift that it is. Sam’s proud look at his partner confirms it.

“That’s always been a hopeful thing, to me,” Callen finishes.

Steve nods, understanding by one of those primal instincts that it’s important to Callen he maintain eye contact. “Hope is in short supply at times. Thanks.”

Later that day, after the three of them have eaten too much shrimp pasta from a food truck (not as good as Kamekona’s, of course) and walked it off along the beach, Steve comes home to find Danny napping on the couch. He’s turned on the ceiling fan, faintly sweating from the afternoon heat. It’s bizarre not to see Danny all balled up but instead sprawled out. One arm hangs off over empty space and one is tucked under his head as a pillow.

Steve stops, staring at him for a moment.

The dark circles under Danny’s eyes are almost gone. His torso is fleshed out and healthy, though Steve still can’t get him to eat enough, ribs barely showing through the T-shirt. In all, he looks agonizingly _vulnerable_ , and the gravity of it, both the privilege and responsibility inherent in this sight, to keep all levels of him safe, flint-strikes a fuse inside Steve’s heart. He has scaled mountains both proverbial and literal, stopped bombs, dug his way out of the trenches, negotiated hostage situations—but no mission in his life has ever carried such stakes as this. 

With gentle motions, he slides the arm back onto the couch so it doesn’t go to sleep. Danny doesn’t wake, obviously exhausted from whatever was discussed at the appointment, like he got in the door and just collapsed on the cushions. His skin is a hair flushed to the touch, when Steve checks his forehead. Next, Steve removes Danny’s shoes. Then the socks so his feet can cool off too.

Lastly, Steve sets out that purple bear on the coffee table, right within Danny’s line of sight so it’ll be the first thing he sees when he wakes up. It’s far more endearing than it should be. He thinks of the spontaneous breakfast yesterday, its inherent mystery in relation to Danny’s behaviour, and struggles to piece together what all these jigsaw fragments of Danny are trying to tell him. His hand rests, heavy and warm, on Danny’s shoulder. Through the vestige of skin his thumb rests on, along the side of Danny's neck where the shirt collar slips down, he can feel the march of his partner's resting, if slightly elevated, pulse. It winds him suddenly, so that he has to sit on the coffee table. 

The whisper that leaves Steve’s lips is barely there, all breath and pathos. “We’re going to overcome, Danno. I’ll make sure, if it’s the last thing I do.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Without realizing it, Steve finds his shoulder pressed into the wall. It’s unsteady, like an earthquake, until it clicks that _he’s_ the one shaking. The wide open room looks like a beast that might eat him.
> 
> Danny does a double take while glancing away from the omelet. “Steve? Hey, Steve. Whoa—”
> 
> He drops the pan right then and there so he can grab at Steve with both hands.

‘So when I lose my way, find me,  
When I loose love’s chains, bind me.  
At the end of all my faith, till the end of all my days,  
When I forget my name, remind me.’

“Dancing in the Minefields” ~ Andrew Peterson

At least Danny hasn’t lost his obsessive love for sitting on available counter space whenever humanly possible. Their kitchen is bigger than they need, really, designed for more people, and so Danny has lots of room to perch at the corner and play on the Switch. His legs swing.

“Have you figured out the bread thing yet?”

Steve pretends not to hear the amusement in Danny’s voice, layered with something incredulous. He chops peppers with more force than necessary. “Oddly enough, one batch almost turned out. It just didn’t rise very well.”

He points to the breadbox by Danny’s hip. Danny pauses his game and removes the Ziploc bag to admire Steve’s deflated mound of white bread. The minute he’d taken it out of the loaf pan, it flopped down into this skillet shape, like a giant frisbee with some air bubbles.

To Steve surprise, Danny even tears off a piece to nibble, if tentative; he obviously expects something different than whatever he tastes.

His eyes widen. “Your UFO loaf would almost be nice as a pita bread. I’m semi-impressed.”

“Semi?” Steve demands.

“Did you solve the mystery of what you’ve been doing wrong?”

“No…but this is pita bread!”

Danny throws him such an affectionate look it’s almost painful. “Whatever you say, Steve.”

He pauses for a beat, in silent yet still audible hesitation, and Steve growls.

“Don’t tell me. I’m working on it.”

Danny mimes zippering his upturned lips.

* * *

Here’s the thing about recovery. The thing Steve had no idea about before he really got started: Sometimes by breaking up the ice of trauma, it allows murky lake monsters access to the surface, where they’ve been imprisoned for years and in their case, decades. Things that have been compartmentalized with extreme prejudice.

He’s never been more content in his entire life, except for perhaps his very early childhood, and because of this he figures the worst is over. They survived the awful stuff. Surely they don’t have to _relive_ it.

Therapy should be the same as any other case—follow where leads take them (do the talking about horrifying memories thing), catch the bad guy (identify triggers), get justice (find coping mechanisms for de-escalating said triggers), celebrate (celebrate), live life in peace. The end.

Recovery does not happen that way for Steve or, he starts to suspect, for anyone else.

Not for one second, even when he returned to Hawaii ten years ago, did he ever have a problem with things other PTSD survivors did. Not the obvious stuff, anyway. Sure, sometimes a car would backfire and he’d startle, looking around for the source, or a distant firework going off is always worse than a close one because then it sounds like a bomb.

But they never hijacked his consciousness. He could always relax any accelerated heartbeat within a minute or two, often while still doing his job. None of those triggers impeded his ability to do life in any capacity, either personal or professional. He actually loves fireworks, shoot ‘em up movies, crowded festivals or beaches with their myriad of people and smells…

So it comes as a complete and bone chilling shock to Steve when one morning he wakes up. Gets dressed. Walks down the hallway from Danny’s room towards the kitchen.

And can’t get any farther than that.

Their first floor is shaped like a square light bulb. It’s completely open concept—living room, kitchen, and dining area all one scumbled room—except for the narrow hallway he’s standing at the mouth of, the stem that contains one bedroom, a linen closet, and full bathroom. The hallway is a comforting kind of narrow, suddenly. The fact that it’s only the width of Steve’s wingspan makes him retreat back into it a few steps.

His heart isn’t fast, but it’s a boxer’s fist in the recesses of his throat. Elevated blood pressure links hands with some latent, slithering adrenal response that raises every last hair on Steve’s arms. He feels weightless for a moment, ready to choke on the thin, stratospheric air of panic.

Danny walks into his line of sight from the kitchen, dishtowel over one shoulder. He’s holding a frying pan in one lively hand, expressive as ever. The fact he woke up before Steve for once should have been the first tip off that something is wrong. “Who knew it was this hard to flip an omelet. I think I’m getting better. You want one, Steve?”

Steve swallows.

“Aha!” A shell of yellow sails briefly over the pan and then Danny holds it out in triumph. “Can’t say no to that, right? Steve?”

Without realizing it, Steve finds his shoulder pressed into the wall. It’s unsteady, like an earthquake, until it clicks that _he’s_ the one shaking. The wide open room looks like a beast that might eat him.

Danny does a double take while glancing away from the omelet. “Steve? Hey, Steve. Whoa—”

He drops the pan right then and there so he can grab at Steve with both hands. They dig into his biceps. Danny seems to understand right as Steve does that this won’t work, so he flips his hands underneath Steve’s elbows instead. The following seconds don’t constitute a fall, not exactly, but Steve loses feeling in his ankles and lets them fold. Danny braces this downward slide, kneeling in front of him.

Crumpled on the floor, Steve breathes shallow, noisy. There’s a ringing in his ears now too.

“You, hey. Stay with me.” Danny’s voice has a tight edge to it, a perfect match for that day on the plane. He shoves Steve’s head between his legs. “You know a fun new hobby the kids are into? Breathing. Let’s try it. Nice and deep, there you go.”

Steve does, mostly because he has no other choice if he doesn’t want to pass out, staring at the only view he has under the triangle of space formed by his left knee and the floor. It’s covered in egg debris and tomatoes, splattered across hardwood. Like fragments. Broken things.

Throughout it all, Danny’s hand is a sentinel on the crown of his head. His thumb hangs down between Steve’s brows and strokes back and forth, a windshield wiper to slick the fog away.

It does a little…too good of a job.

Steve stiffens again, his muscles mortar inside the stencil of his body. The entire organ that makes up Steve’s skin feels like cactus prickles, only if someone makes contact with him, _he_ bleeds. Those mortar prickles start to crack and so does his control.

“Okay, alright.” Danny snatches his hand back once he gets a read on Steve’s body language. “No touching for a while. That’s cool.”

He hops to his feet and runs for the kitchen sink. Steve hears the faucet moments before Danny is back on his knees at Steve’s side, holding out a glass of water.

“Drink it,” he orders. “All of it.”

Steve’s hands are trembling but he refuses Danny’s help, even when some of it spills on his shirt. Danny just watches with a wry look. The water is so cold that it unnerves Steve a bit, an icy waterfall in his stomach. Danny filches the glass out of his hand the second he’s finished and dashes away.

And what do you know—he returns a second time with yet another full glass of water.

Steve wants to speak but he’s too wound up. He shakes his head.

Two can play at that game. Danny nods, pushing it into Steve’s hands. “Just trust me for a second, would you?”

Steve does trust Danny, with every single cell of his body, from both pinky toes to follicles on the top of his head, so he reluctantly takes another sip. This water is warmer, tepid. Puzzled, Steve downs it in three tottering gulps.

Danny bobs his head with satisfaction and relieves him of the glass. “Be right back.”

For a third time, Danny spirits away to the kitchen while Steve remembers what a full belly of oxygen is supposed to feel like. He’s shaken by the yawning fear, the fact that it has no discernible pattern or logic. He can’t attach the feeling to a specific memory. Why in the bloody world would their house spook him? Where did the sudden panic come from?

When Danny returns, he sits down, legs folded pretzel-style. In his palm are two fat saltine crackers. Steve isn’t sure, both with the lingering radiation sickness and heightened state, that these will stay down.

Danny seems to read his mind in a single pass of eye contact. “They’re not for your stomach. The crackers aren’t even about food but I’d really appreciate it if you eat them. Please.”

The ‘please’ is a barren tree stripped raw after a hurricane. Danny’s voice rarely sounds like that if he can help it and even rarer still over an issue so seemingly mundane.

Something Steve’s therapist said at one of their sessions doesn’t make sense until this second…she talked about how people who love you shoulder pain. _His_ pain. Close the door to problems and you slam the door on love and joy too. They come in a bundle, despite countless attempts to separate them.

The truth of this fact gazes at him in the form of Danny’s wide blue eyes, the slight twitch of his fingers he can’t quite hide.

He’s scared too. By Steve. _For_ Steve.

It’s a light bulb in Steve’s mind and he takes the crackers at once. That first bite nauseates him, but the more he eats the calmer he feels. Shock envelopes Steve, at how fast the effect works.

Danny uncoils in mirror with him. “The salt, it, uh…it forces your salivary glands to activate, which is in direct opposition to any adrenaline you got going on. The two can’t exist at the same time. If your body is dehydrated, it agitates dry mouth and fuels the panic cycle, hence my insistence upon drinking all the water first.”

Steve stops chewing to stare at Danny.

A blossom of scarlet opens up along Danny’s cheeks in true Danny fashion. He shrugs. “What? You’re not the only one who gets wigged out at the drop of a hat, though I have to say your episodes happen faster than mine. The saltine trick worked for me, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt you any.”

Steve scans the large room, licking his lips. He remains uneasy, but it’s a conscious thing now, like the whining of a mosquito instead of a nuke sized klaxon. He wipes sweaty palms along the knees of his pants for an excuse to move. They’re jittery but not quaking anymore.

“Th…” He exhales and has to try again. His voice still comes out brittle. “Thanks, Danno. You get these too?”

It stings him, acutely, that Danny might have suffered something similar all by himself. Alone. Huddled up on the floor because his body thinks it’s being threatened in real time. That’s not a pattern Steve ever wants Danny to repeat, not even over the small things, not after the disaster last time he tried hiding something.

“Oh.” Danny reaches for Steve’s knee, stopping himself at the last second. “Don’t worry about that right now, okay? This is about you. Anything specific?”

Steve shakes his head. He tables Danny’s cagey response and obsession with making him elaborate breakfast food to deal with later. “The room it…”

Danny glances out into the living area and then at Steve. “You felt exposed, huh?”

“I think you’re right.” Steve blinks. “It’s too…threatening or something.”

“You wanna spend the day in my room? I can bring you meals.”

Light headedness assaults Steve again but this time it’s a welcome, warming sensation. He expected an inquest, some pushy bid to talk about his feelings and pin down the memory trigger before it can fly away.

But Danny just looks back at him, offering an escape. Sunlight from the kitchen windows halos them both in milky white light, at just the right angle to banish any and all shadows from the room. It’s far too bright and unprotected right now, a haunting contrast.

“Sounds like a plan,” says Steve.

Danny stands and then can’t seem to resist holding out a hand, though he looks uncertain doing so. Steve gets to his feet by his own power, ignoring the offer of help. Danny’s face does that signature scrunch in response, a bid to squash disappointment or hurt. It’s stony now, set in a dimpled almost-grin that doesn’t reach his eyes.

“Let me fetch some food and I’ll join you for a bit.”

Steve ends up camped out on the floor, back against the foot of Danny’s bed. He tries answering emails on his phone to get in at least _some_ productivity this morning, but mostly Steve relishes the dim lighting Danny prefers in his bedroom. Cozy and narrow and _safe_. Just like Danny himself.

The pitter-patter of Danny’s bare feet precedes his entrance. He plops down beside Steve, leaving a hand’s length between them, and holds out a plate of toast, eggs, and strawberries.

Steve’s nose wrinkles.

“Gotta eat, babe.”

“That’s my line. You eat like a bird.”

“Well, here.” Danny pops a berry in his mouth and speaks around it like a chipmunk. “Now I’m eating. Don’t leave a brother hanging.”

They munch on the food in silence for a bit. Despite nerves still armed and ready, Steve finds himself drained by the sudden crash, a depleted battery before the day has even started. Danny whispers a tune to himself while texting Grace. The phone’s blue light sheens bronze off his hair and long eyelashes, golden flakes of brilliance that shine even in darker spaces.

“Danno?”

“Yeah?” Danny doesn’t look away from the screen.

Steve wants to touch him, unsure of how his body will react. He settles for a thumb against the underside of Danny’s wrist. The prickles crumble away into dust, an instant relief to Steve.

Danny stills.

“You learned that from your therapist…didn’t you?”

“Of course.” Danny replies without hesitation or shame. “I’ve got some more strategies for the next time this happens. Just you wait.”

The sting is back, graduating to a nimbus ache, heavy with its own gravity but not quite so sharp. Still, it’s spiny in Steve’s chest. He feels Danny’s steady heart beat and tries to count his own breaths to it. Inhale every three beats, hold, exhale for five. The process works, and it’s a testament to how wordless their communication has gotten that Danny knows exactly what he’s doing, ready to sit in silence until he’s done.

Steve whispers into the quiet moment. “When?”

Danny doesn’t ask what he’s talking about. Doesn’t demand that Steve drop the subject since he’s not the one cowering in a hallway just because the size of a room made him feel defenseless. His eyes are back on his phone, but it’s gone dark and he doesn’t unlock it.

“Weird things, like I told you after the nightmare,” says Danny finally. “Just…being in the ocean sometimes or rush hour traffic or driving the car. All those associations, they make me feel…”

“Unsafe.” Steve doesn’t point out that Danny didn’t answer the question. Because maybe he did and Steve just hasn’t been paying attention. “Your subconscious remembers what that’s like.”

“Right on the money.” Danny’s voice is as bracing as his hands. “That’s exactly what the doc says.”

Steve senses that while for him, his body is the problem to be wrangled at the moment, perhaps Danny’s spirit or psyche is what’s causing him the most grief. He compartmentalizes too, a lot better than Steve grasped until a few years ago. It’s his heart or perception of the world that tends to struggle.

“That’s why you watch me surf.” The dots connect for Steve in the same instant he says it. Awe bursts over his head. “You don’t like being near the ocean by yourself. That’s why you’re wading all the time lately, trying to acclimatize.”

Danny shrugs again, even less nonchalant this round. “Busted.”

“Next time you drive, I’m coming with you.” Steve nods, decisive.

Danny huffs in a breathless laugh. “It’s not all the time that my body thinks it’s about to be kidnapped, Steve. Most days I’m perfectly fine, and so are you.”

“Didn’t you just give me hell over hiding something?”

Danny flushes again. “I see your point. It’s not an angsty thing, I’m just…usually alone when it happens.”

“I reiterate: next time I’m _coming with you_. Everywhere. Get used to it.”

Danny ends up being right though, as usual—Steve comes out the next morning and it’s like nothing happened. He walks through the kitchen into the dining area without incident.

There’s no predicting the spells, which usually have to do with a vague sense of _bad, bad, oh bad_. Sometimes Steve can simply be standing in line at the grocery store and he has to set everything down and run off to a cramped aisle to breathe for a few minutes. Sometimes it’s a stimulus as stupid as roller blade wheels on the boardwalk. He’ll startle and feel like the sound is a prelude to something much, much worse. The mosquito becomes a foghorn.

He learns that Danny, naturally, is the complete and polar opposite. He _hates_ small spaces even more than he did before. He seems most at ease on a sunny day, outside. Not a wall or corner in sight.

In this new quest to be totally up front with each other, no matter how overwhelming or embarrassing, they start asking for help more often:

Once, Danny balks in front of their walk-in linen closet and go finds Steve, hands shaking. Steve takes one look at him, nods, and puts away the laundry instead. Sometimes Danny can only get his feet into the ocean and that’s enough for one day. Steve will quietly lead him back onto the sand while he trembles.

There are at least two days where Steve ends up panicking at home, for seemingly no reason. The first is after a run, his heart rate already galloping away. The second time is even more asinine—he’s tightening the tires on their cars. Both times, he seeks out Danny and together they de-escalate that adrenaline response.

Danny still can’t stick his head in their upstairs crawlspace. The Sarin gas nightmares happen a few more times, most definitely linked to his claustrophobia in a roundabout way. There are…other night terrors too, specific triggers for Danny that Steve can’t quite put his finger on or figure out, no matter how much he wheedles.

It starts to become a _thing_ , to the point that all Steve or Danny have to do is tap each other on the wrist and they drop whatever they’re doing for the other. And what do you know—this therapy thing actually begins to work, with a molasses-slow speed that makes Steve want to tear his hair out, but steady progress easy to see and track. Their episodes lessen, occurring with less frequency overall, even the nightmares.

Another day it is Steve pulling up short of the first floor _freaking again_. Danny trails behind him and halts when he does. He looks at his watch, as if ready to time Steve’s inane panic storm.

“Is this a no touching, give me a minute day? One for yes, two for no.”

Steve holds up his index finger. So Danny stands with him for a while and talks about baseball statistics, of all things, until the room stops looking like an ambush. Until Steve can breathe without it crackling like a cherry bomb in his diaphragm.

Ambush…an ambush…

“Kandahar,” he blurts.

Danny pauses mid-ramble, about the decline in decent pitchers these days, to glance up at him. “Kandahar, like Afghanistan? You want to elaborate on that?”

“We were running a mission in Kandahar.” Steve’s posture uncurls in tandem with the confidence level of his tone. He hasn’t thought about this mission in years. “There was a courtyard that looked deserted, with a fountain and trees on either side. It was calm, a rest stop.”

There’s a beat of quiet while Danny processes. “I’m guessing this story doesn’t end well.”

Steve’s heart is a foxtrot now. “That’s it, Danny, that’s why the room makes me jumpy sometimes. It feels like the courtyard ambush.”

“Steve,” says Danny, with infinite care and grace. “Steve, what happened?”

Steve knows, can repeatedly tell himself, that this first floor is not a courtyard in the Middle East. But his body doesn’t get the memo. Somehow, though, the act of knowing where that fear is coming from means Steve already feels like it’s half defeated. He can see the machinations of the beast, his own wizard behind the curtain.

“Eight of us went in.”

Danny waits until a minute or two has passed, frowning. He prompts, “Uh-huh. Eight SEALs went in and then what?”

“Well…” Steve swallows. “Then only three of us came out.”

This time, Danny stays quiet. He’s ashen in the light, but grim and resigned too. He nods with a soft buzz in his throat, and together the two of them stare out at the not-courtyard. Steve focuses on what makes the two different: one of Grace’s hoodies thrown along the back of the recliner, Danny’s ball cap hooked over a dining room chair, a stack of unread novels on the coffee table, the green and blue umbrella over the turtle eggs that’s visible through the windows if Steve squints.

He forces his foot to move forward. Heel to toe, his heartbeat so fast that he can feel it where his arch meets the floor. Then the other one.

Danny keeps abreast, totally silent.

And there are no trip wires and explosions that shake the enamel in Steve’s teeth or bullets raining down from sniper nests. No letters to write to distraught wives or dog tags to collect.

This time there is only hardwood, cheery sunshine, and Danny Williams walking step-for-step beside him. The house—their house—is peaceful. He’s safe. They both are. He lost his SEAL brothers but he is not about to lose Danny at the drop of a hat.

 _Nobody’s trying to kill me, trying tear_ us _apart._

The thought is a detonation in Steve’s gut, once he understands what the fear is really about.

With it, a spell has been broken—Steve’s body acts faster than his brain and searches for Danny. It’s a hail Mary of an action, his hand flailing in the space between them. However, Danny is already right there, reaching out before Steve can take another breath. He’s enveloped in strong, wiry arms and a shirt that smells like the equally elaborate smoothie Danny made them for breakfast.

Steve curls himself around Danny and for once his body gets it without extra help—he made it home. Because home was never this place, never just Hawaii, never the past. It’s here, in his arms, and nobody is going to snatch it away from him in one fell blast.

“This is good, hugging’s good,” says Danny, cautious. “We’ve downgraded to DEFCON four, I presume?”

Steve nods into his shoulder. “We’re good.”

And they are. Steve doesn’t know how he ever lived without this man.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re amazing, you know that?”
> 
> “Are you buttering me up for something?”
> 
> Steve ignores the deflection. “You quasi-adopted thirteen children. You’re easily the biggest pushover I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something.”

‘Sometimes it hits me like a train,  
Just how insane  
And how hard to believe,  
Out of all the people in history  
And all who will ever be,  
I found you, you found me.’

“Speechless” ~ Jon McLaughlin

Most of the things Steve learns about Danny are pleasant or fascinating. Little quirks to be amused by. Like the feline way he sleeps. Or how he always butters the left side of his toast first, then the right. His newfound love for making omelets of increasingly wacky flavour combinations. (Seriously, he served Steve a curry and pepper one just yesterday. It wasn’t half bad.)

Finding out that Danny is a sugar dealer for virtually everyone under sixteen years old in the neighbourhood takes the cake, pun intended.

Steve is pouring mini chocolate bars into the giant orange bowl—Danny had drawn the line at Steve’s (much cooler) idea of giving out mini Swiss army knives—when a knock sounds on their door. Danny is upstairs, which leaves Steve to wonder at the early hour for this visitor. It’s not even seven o’clock.

A _short_ visitor, with the sound coming from a little over knee height, below their door’s window. Steve brings over the bowl, fully expecting a loud ‘trick or treat!’ when he opens the door.

Nope.

His eyes travel down to a positively elfin girl. She’s wearing brown tights, a green tunic, and soft leather slippers. Steve, personally, thinks she looks more like Tinkerbell than Peter Pan with her flossy, almost white curls. They’re a short afro puffing out from her head. She’s faintly panting, cheeks apple red.

“Hello,” says Steve. He glances around for her parents but she’s alone. “You here early for some candy?”

Upon seeing his startling height, she takes a step back. “Is Miss’r Williams here?”

When she speaks, Steve gets a full view of her missing front teeth. The voice also surprises him, timbre a hair deeper than he expects for someone who’s barely older than a toddler.

“He is.” Steve shuffles to the side, noting that she doesn’t move. “You’re welcome to come inside.”

She doesn’t, not until Danny jogs down the stairs and notices her. It has a visible effect on the kid, who relaxes enough to look her proper age. She walks inside and Danny kneels down in front of her. Over her head, Steve gives Danny a funny look, not even at the fact this child knows Danny by name, because of _course_ he does, but at her concerningly small size which apparently doesn’t match her age and the guarded look in her eye that shouldn’t exist in any child.

 _‘Later,’_ Danny mouths. Then he turns his attention back to their visitor.

“Hey, Mina.” Danny’s tone is light but with that hidden inflection Steve knows like a prayer. A ready, Occam’s razor of whether this situation will require a gun or comfort. “What’s up? I like your costume.”

“Thanks. Emily made it.”

Danny nods appreciatively. “Your mom’s good with a sewing machine, isn’t she? Congrats on your first Halloween with the Mathersons.”

The words seem to wake Mina from her mistrustful haze and she tiptoes closer to rest her equally elfin hand on Danny’s forearm. He’s working not to frown now.

“You okay, Mina?”

She glances up at Steve, eyes uncertain, and he immediately sits down on one of the island stools so he’s not towering over them.

“That’s Steve,” says Danny. “He’s real nice, I promise, especially on days he’s had pancakes.”

“Stheve?” she lisps.

Which, okay. That has no right being so adorable.

Danny smiles. “Yeah, he’s got an even gooier heart than I do.”

_Debatable._

Still, when Mina looks over at Steve, he taps a palm on his chest. Solidarity for this poignant, worrying moment happening in their kitchen. Danny’s patience, waiting for Mina to work up her nerve, seems to be the thing that does the job in the end, in a very real echo of the way it always does for Steve. She points out the door, back to where she came from.

“Carl…Dad was working the garage when his hand went all funny.”

The words incite a palpable jolt of electricity in the room. Danny looks up at Steve too, eyes clouded.

You’d never know it when his voice comes out with perfect control. “How so? Was it just his hand?”

“And his shoulders.” Mina points to her feet. “His toes and knee looked like my puppets. Then he fell on the floor. He didn’t wake up when I talked to him.”

“Where’s your mom, hmm?” Danny stands, ensconcing her little hand in his own. Urgency filters into his tone. “Did Emily drive you?”

“She’s on a bus’ness trip.”

Both Danny, ready to bolt out the door with her, and Steve, holding his phone in preparation for calling 911, stop dead. The two men gape at each other.

Then Danny is back on one knee. “Mina, honey, did you _walk_ all the way here from your house?”

At last, a thin line of water fills up Mina’s eyes. She shakes her head. “No, Miss’r Williams—I _ran_ , ‘cause you said to come whenever somethin’ was scary.” Her chest hitches. “An’ D-Dad wouldn’t wake up.”

Danny has Mina up in his arms, settled on his right hip, before her first tear falls. She wraps her arms around his neck. He babbles off the address to Steve for the ambulance and now, doing the mental math, he’s dumbstruck too—this kid ran almost half a mile by herself. Just because she knew Danny could fix it.

“I’m so proud of you,” says Danny. He bobs his knees a smidgen in an effort to soothe her. “That was a brave thing you did. And call me Danny, remember?”

“D…Danny.” Mina tries it out, sounding unsure.

“Mina?” Steve doesn’t need to touch Danny to know his heart is racing. He can see it in the sudden sweat along his collar and the tight way he holds Mina to his chest. At Steve’s voice, they both turn. “Did your dad have foam coming out of his mouth?”

“Foam?” Mina’s brow wrinkles.

“Bubbles,” Danny tries again. He gets where Steve is going with this. “White drool, basically.”

Mina sniffles. “Yes.”

“I’m taking my car,” says Danny to Steve, nodding in thanks when Steve chucks him a water bottle, for a very dehydrated Mina.

“I’ll be right behind you.”

Danny whisks them both away before Steve can follow, especially since the operator picks up right as the door closes. He lists off the house where they can find the patient, along with a former cop who will meet them there and the fact that it was probably a seizure. He’s amazed, yet not surprised, that Danny has earned such loyalty from their neighbour kids. Once he hangs up, he immediately grabs his sneakers, cursing the fact that his car had to have work done this week. He’ll sprint the whole way too, if he has to.

Before he can, however, yet _another_ knee-high knock rat-a-tat-tats on the door.

Steve halts in surprise, then realizes, of course. It’s still Halloween. He’ll just do this one and then leave the bowl out for any other kids who come along.

For the second time in under an hour, Steve opens the door and doesn’t see what he expects. Instead of individual families or siblings, twelve— _twelve—_ children stand huddled on the doorstep together. An older teen at the back, maybe fourteen, acts as chaperone, texting while wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat.

The youngest, the one who knocked on the door, lights up. “Twick or tweet!”

Steve stares at the boy, his bumblebee antennae swinging drunkenly around as he squirms. There’s a whole clashing menagerie of themes going on—an astronaut, Miss Frizzle, one kid with dreadlocks who in a humorous twist of irony is dressed as Heimdall, his white cane and arm hooked around his sister, who’s a princess, Brady dressed as a lion, a firetruck…

“Wow,” says Steve. “These are some pretty cool costumes. You all came as a group?”

“Yep!” The bumblebee nods, apparently their chosen spokesperson. Probably because he’s three and also adorable. Everyone knows you send the cute kids up front to get more candy.

Steve holds out the bowl in preparation for plunking chocolate in their buckets, but the kids whisper to each other. He’s had enough scares for one night and, thus keyed up, looks them over.

“You guys all good?”

“Um.” The blind boy’s sister looks sheepish. “Mr. Williams usually gives us freezies. But if-if you don’t want to, we’re totally fine.”

Steve runs their grocery list through his mind, because _he’s_ the one who does all the shopping and he has no memory of buying any. He holds up a ‘wait a second’ finger and reaches around to check the top freezer. “I’m sorry, guys, we don’t have any freezies…”

But low and behold, when he opens the door—there is indeed an open jumbo box of freezies in an assortment of colours.

And they’re _labelled_.

Danny has somehow done this often enough to know which flavour each kid likes best. Steve’s jaw drops at the Sharpied names on each one. He hasn’t been this shocked in a long time. The gesture is a small, cute thing, Danny regularly giving out frozen treats to their neighbourhood kids when Steve is out, if the box of ice cream sandwiches, cake pops, and fudge bars are anything to go by, but it’s also moving in a way Steve doesn’t have a name for.

He recovers to see the children patiently waiting and feels a taste of the same affection Danny probably has for them all. Some days you just have to roll with it.

“Alright.” Steve holds up the first one sideways to read a name in Danny’s scrawl. “I’ve got a cherry freezie for…Dylan?”

Sherlock Holmes looks surprised but he raises his hand. Steve passes it to him.

“Jason, blueberry blast?”

Heimdall smiles. Steve warns him verbally that it’s coming so the cold touching his skin doesn’t startle him.

“Grape, Rose?”

A small tiger stands on her tiptoes to reach Steve’s hand.

“Brady, my man. Here’s an orange with your name on it.”

“Awesome!” His lion ears flop, courtesy of an enthusiastic leap. “Thank you!”

The simple ablution of handing out sugar to excited children, like trusting baby birds, is oddly cathartic and it calms Steve from the earlier alarm. He also brings out a pair of scissors to help them tear off the tops. Once all twelve of the freezies have been distributed, he stands there with the empty box for a moment, watching them eat. They giggle at each other’s colourful tongues and thank him profusely, once he introduces himself.

One kid’s eyes spark with recognition. “You’re the army man Mr. Williams always talks about!”

“Navy,” Steve corrects, before realizing that Danny is a little brat who actually taught them wrong just to irritate him. “But close enough. Make sure to call Danno a ‘Benny’ and we’re even.”

Steve _is_ feeling pretty gooey, so he gives them the rest of their candy stash after extracting promises that they’ll share with any kids they meet along the way who don’t have as much. He won’t be around to hand it out anyway. He flicks off the porch light, like Logan did earlier that night, so other kids know to skip their house.

“Thanks, Mr. Steve!”

“Thanks, Army Man!”

Steve rolls his eyes at Rose’s call. “You’re welcome. Be careful.”

Brady gives him a sloppy salute that Danny most _definitely_ taught him—also to irritate Steve—with chocolate stained fingers. “We will!”

When they finally drift off into the night and Steve hoofs it to the Matherson house, the action is pretty much over. No ambulances, though the garage door is still open, and no hysterics. In fact, Steve would never know something was amiss if it weren’t for the spilled tools he can see in the garage and a bandage wrapper one of the paramedics must have dropped. The house is quiet and dark except for the rattle of chains from a porch swing. Danny sits with Mina on his lap, the girl fast asleep in exhaustion.

Danny looks tired too, though just the sight of Steve makes him grin. He stops pushing at the swing. “Hey, Martha Stewart.”

“Oh no.” Steve hops the porch steps two at a time and sits beside Danny. “After the night I’ve had, you don’t get to call me that.”

“You bake bread,” says Danny, explaining his joke.

“And you’re a grandma to every child on this street,” Steve fires back.

Confused for a beat, Danny peers askance from him back to the sunset. “They came for their freezies, huh?”

“There’s a story there.”

Danny snorts. “Not really. I just saw a sweaty kid one day, Dylan, and offered him the ice cream sandwich I’d just bought. Two days later he brought over his siblings. And then they brought over their friends, who told their friends…”

Steve tucks Danny under his left arm and pats the opposite shoulder. “Unbelievable, right? People are too nice for their own good sometimes.”

Danny swats his belly with the back of his hand for the sass, a parroting of his own words.

“Is Carl Matherson okay?”

Danny nods. “He’s got epilepsy, apparently, and forgot to take his meds. He wouldn’t wake up because when he fell, he hit his head.”

“Concussion?”

“A mild one, probably. I just regret not having a booster seat for Mina, which is why I didn’t drive her to the hospital. That, and the EMTs checked Mina out—after downing some juice and apple sauce, she’s fine. Emily is driving back from a costuming conference now and should be here in an hour or two.”

Steve’s brows go up. “A costuming conference?”

“She’s the head designer for a ballet company here in LA. Paul’s an electrician. When I first met him, he joked that both he and his wife worked with a needle and thread.”

Steve laughs. “You’ve met most of our neighbours, haven’t you?”

“I’ve met their kids, at least.”

“Of course you have. I expect nothing less from compulsive helicopter parent Danny Williams.”

Steve checks Mina to make sure their voices haven’t woken her. Her head is tipped into Danny’s chest, mouth open and brow smooth for the first time that evening. Steve spots a scar on the inside of her elbow, a cigarette burn, and puts the clues together.

“She’s a foster kid? Abusive background?”

Danny, motionless, stops breathing altogether, and Steve is so used to this ritual by now that he simply takes in a deeper breath. The exaggerated motion relaxes Danny in a full body melt, feeling Steve’s ribs press against his own. In the same way Steve touches Danny’s stomach, Danny will lean against Steve’s side at random moments throughout the day, just to savour him breathe.

“Her growth got stunted from neglect and lack of food,” says Danny at length. His voice is strained, not just angry so much as sorrowful. “I didn’t believe Emily the first time she told me Mina is five.”

Neither would Steve, looking at this dwarfed little girl. She’s smaller even than Grace at this age, from what he’s seen of pictures, and Steve wonders if Danny, the shortest of all his siblings, was like this in kindergarten too. The thought of someone deliberately hurting a child sends a dangerous roar through his ears. It’s the same kind of burning anger he gets when he thinks about Danny’s trauma sometimes.

His arm tightens and Danny doesn’t comment, save to rest more of his weight against Steve. It’s a repeat of that moved feeling, a pull on Steve’s lungs. Their long street is quiet, with the younger Halloween crowd finished for the night, sun halfway gone, Danny safely where he should be, who protectively holds Mina the same way Steve is holding him.

Danny pushes at the deck with his toes, and the swing continues its creaky song. Mina snuffles into Danny’s shirt.

If someone asked Steve a year ago what serenity looks like, he wouldn’t have had a context for what to say. Maybe eating a bullet in the line of duty and knowing he’d be missed after he died. Maybe a barbecue with his ohana after a long case. Maybe playing with Eddie on the beach.

All of that is still somewhat true, but Steve wouldn’t say any of those things now. His definition is constantly changing, in direct proportion to whatever he’s doing with Danny at the time and how much he learns about, and therefore loves, him.

It’s like the universe peels back, just a bit, to let Steve soak in the full scope of things he wouldn’t otherwise be aware of. The precise placement of his life in the scheme of history is a gift, and he knows it:

He is Steve McGarrett, forty-four years old, in Los Angeles, with the warmth of Danny Williams slumped against him, on Halloween night in the twenty first century, listening to a child sniffle in her sleep, bearing no other responsibility but to love well and live out the rest of his days in peace, however many are left.

“Love you, Danno,” he breathes, because that’s what his brain always provides him with when he’s overwhelmed by these nameless, awed feelings. And he’s learning you can never tell people enough.

Danny tilts his head onto Steve’s shoulder. “Love you too, Steve.”

“You’re amazing, you know that?”

“Are you buttering me up for something?”

Steve ignores the deflection. “You quasi-adopted thirteen children. You’re easily the biggest pushover I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something.”

“Mmm…” Danny flicks Steve in the ribs. “Unless you’re talking to a mirror, I think you did your math wrong.”

“Just don’t change.” Steve rubs at the skin of Danny’s arm. He used to hate verbal sentiment, stumbled over it even, but it’s like his hull of stoic self sufficiency has sprung a permanent leak. Where there used to be shame saying emotion out loud, now exists only a kind of tender urgency. “Please don’t lose that soft heart.”

Danny closes his eyes, a tired smile playing across his lips. “Aye, aye, captain.”

“I’m a commander, not a captain—and I know you taught those kids wrong on purpose.”

Danny doesn’t hear this, already dozing off. Though it’s strange to have the last word, Steve just looks down at Danny fondly. The sun is gone, slipping below the horizon, but its heat remains in the windless air.

Steve takes over rocking duties with his foot, pleased when Mina nuzzles into his warmth too. Her button nose mushes into his torso like Danny does at night sometimes. The two of them are thawing against Steve, warm and soapy and true. He keeps rubbing at Danny’s skin and knows he’s found what his biological family never gave him.

It really is nightfall by the time Mrs. Matherson screeches into the driveway. Danny, dozing, fumbles awake. His wiry body is tense and ready until he sees Steve waving to Emily. She runs up the steps, which is quite a feat in heels, and Danny barely holds Mina out before Emily’s face crumples and she scoops the little girl into her arms.

Mina smiles when she recognizes who is holding her. It marks the first time Steve’s ever seen her face ease into an expression that is not fear or pain, and it’s a light source unto its own. “Mommy!”

Both Danny and Emily gasp a little, and Steve understands this to be a milestone thing. They’re all learning things about each other tonight. Emily rains kisses onto Mina’s face.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Emily stresses, holding Danny’s hand more than shaking it like she did Steve’s. Smeared mascara doesn’t match her glowing smile. “I wasn’t due home until tomorrow and she would have been all alone.”

In an out of character moment, Danny can’t seem to find any words for a reply. He looks dazed, his right cheek lined with a frieze imprint of Steve’s shirt from where he fell asleep.

Steve jumps in to rescue him. “Mina saved the day herself. She ran to our house for help.”

Emily eyes the two men with something knowing. “You might be retired, but you’re still saving lives and I, for one, am glad to have you in our neighbourhood.”

In any other situation, the words might be a throw away. One of those nice things new neighbours say to each other out of habit. But this community is a little different and people could have died tonight. So they feel heavy, just like the awe in Steve’s chest.

Danny finds his voice. “We’re glad too. She’s welcome to drop by any time—there’s always a cake pop with her name on it.”

They watch Mrs. Matherson and Mina drive away to the hospital. Only then does Steve notice that he still has his arm around Danny. He keeps it there, healed by a crisis that had a happy ending. Just like them. 

“You doing okay?” Steve asks. He knows how jumpy just the sound of a siren can make Danny, let alone a scared child. The whole scenario hits a little close to home.

“It’s been an eventful evening.” Danny hums. “But all around, yeah. I think so. You?”

“I’m adding freezies to our grocery list.”

* * *

Part of Steve is aware that they are lucky about this. That _he_ is lucky to a terrible, unfathomable extent.

There are practical reasons contributing to his good fortune, like the fact that he and Danny lived together in Hawaii before coming here, which has made the day to day domesticity and chores ten thousand times easier. There’s been virtually no adjustment period in that area, in the sense of brushing shoulders and being able to tell whose clothes are whose in the dresser drawers by feel alone and knowing which exact toothpaste brand Danny likes so he can buy it on the grocery runs (shopping is one of Steve’s assigned duties, mostly because Danny can’t be trusted to buy enough food for himself.)

In the way they know each other’s circadian rhythms down to the second, when they’ll wake up based on how they slept or the fact that Danny can always tell when Steve is running out of steam at one of Isabelle’s patio dinners without even looking at him. He’ll offer an excuse, say goodbye to Logan and the Mathersons—with the usual hug for Mina, of course—and shepherd a hundred and eighty pounds of former SEAL across the road. 

But Steve knows he’s lucky in greater spheres than that.

Many people die young without finding their person—or worse, they die _old_. Not that the choice to be alone is a bad one, with Logan a prime example someone who doesn’t want to do life in the constant presence of another person, but for Steve, he just assumed he’d never get the chance to begin with. Hope and peace were for other people, people he fought and bled to protect, who would never know the lengths their government goes to in keeping them blissfully unaware. As it should be. Before Steve came to Hawaii, and even then, he’d never let himself dare to want anything.

And _certainly_ not finding someone who got it. Who calls him out on his crap and comforts him while wading through it in equal measure.

Danny will hug Grace with a wink just for Steve or goad him into a polemic over his taste in burger condiments or throw a wry smile at him while holding up two movie options— _what are we thinking, babe?_ —and just like that Steve hazes out for a second, understanding the bigger picture of his own life.

“ _So it’s working?_ ” Lou asks. “ _This whole retiring with your boy thing?_ ”

Supper is on the stove, the first time Steve’s attempted to cook chili since they moved. Most nights it’s been too hot for steaming food, let alone spicy, but with the arrival of autumn, he thought it might be apropos. This is aided by the fact that they’re eating supper especially late tonight—the sun is already set, further cooling the air. Steve peers out the window into the darkness, like he can magically hasten Danny back from his support group. They’ve never run this late before.

_I should have driven him again._

“Yeah.” Steve’s phone is on speaker where it sits against the bread box, allowing his old friend’s voice to fill up the kitchen. “We’ve had some bumps in the road, but it really is. Mary’s gotten squirrely about it, in a wheedling sister kind of way.”

Lou laughs. “ _She still trying to figure out the details?_ ”

“There _are_ no details,” Steve argues. He circles the wooden spoon for emphasis in a distinctly Danny tic, which only serves to dot the countertop with splotches of tomato sauce. “That’s the point.”

“ _And I bet that answer drove her crazy. It sounds even more incriminating._ ”

Steve, frustrated, opens the spice drawer and roots through their glass jars. A high-pitched flurry of clinking fills the air, like an angry fairy. Where is the oregano? “Some things are so simple they’re just…hard to explain, that’s all.”

“ _Mhmm. You know, the kids nowadays_ do _have a fancy word for what you two are._ ”

“Oh, I bet they do, but that’s too bad…” With the oregano nowhere to be found, Steve’s brow hunkers low over his eyes. He finds himself riled up for reasons he can’t quite put his finger on, feeling defensive of what they have and rankled afresh that people don’t get it. “…Because we already decided on one.”

“ _Did you now?_ ” Lou sounds amused and fond in the same breath.

“It’s all Danny’s fault.”

“ _Naturally_.”

Shoving the drawer shut, Steve roots through the cupboard instead and adds the necessary spice to the pot. Finally. Maybe now his chili will have some kick.

“ _You gonna tell me what it is or do I have to guess, Vanna?_ ”

Overlooking the tease, Steve pauses in his aggressive chili stirring, though he absently chucks in another tablespoon of spice. Danny is more likely to eat things if they’re flavourful. A rare moment of self consciousness steals over Steve, shy about how to explain Danny’s grandfather’s metaphor about soldiers and foxholes and how it’s both of them to a T, huddled up breath-for-breath in this loamy patch of earth, looking out at the world as each other’s defense. He doesn’t think anyone else will understand, as evidenced by Mary’s subtle but consistent badgering.

Lou must sense something of this, or perhaps Steve’s agitated cooking is a klaxon unto its own, for his voice suddenly softens. “ _Hey, man, sorry if I pushed too far. I just know things like this can be an adjustment, for you and your families._ ”

“It’s not,” Steve blurts, before he can make this bi-weekly phone call dive any deeper into heavy waters. “That’s the thing, Lou, it hasn’t been an adjustment at all.”

“ _Okay_ ,” says Lou, so carefully mild.

“And…and he’s pure.” Steve throws in a different spice, darker, with more force than necessary. “Danny is a pure light, Lou.”

This is a fact as obvious as gravity keeping his feet on the ground when he gets up in the morning. He’s positive of it.

“ _Course he is. That’s why you picked him. He might seem like a crusty old man, but he’s just bluffing. We all know that._ ”

Steve wipes his forehead and is startled to feel that he’s sweating. His chili has burped down to a simmer. “Lou, how come some people insist it has to be one way or the other?”

His friend’s deep voice whirs across the line while he thinks. It’s a knowing hum. Lou is far smarter than Steve, at least when it comes to human beings, and he telegraphs that by one note alone. The question doesn’t make any sense and it’s not even an issue Steve is particularly paranoid about, but Mary’s questions bothered him.

“ _He’s your friend_ ,” says Lou.

Steve straightens, vindicated. He’s proven wrong for the second time in under an hour, that someone else does get it. “Yeah…yeah, exactly. Danny is my best friend.”

“ _But he’s_ your _friend._ ”

Lou changes the inflection and Steve’s brow takes a hike in the opposite direction, up halfway to his hairline. Why is this so complicated for people?

“That’s what I just said.”

“ _No, you didn’t. Both statements are true, and that’s okay._ ” Then Lou rumbles another note, this one heartfelt and paternal, for when Lou is plagued with an overwrought of sentiment. “ _You’re beating the odds, Steve, every day. Never stop celebrating that. There were so many times we almost lost you both, but you’re alive and still full of soul._ ”

On the outside, it seems like a non-sequitur, Lou rambling off on another compassion-makes-the-world-go-round tangent. Steve, however, has known the man long enough to connect the dots. His steps feel lighter when he nods, then looks out at the headlights of Danny’s car pulling in.

“Thanks, Lou, for seeing what we are.”

“ _What you are is a couple ‘a old fools, who love each other very much without that word meaning what it usually does when two people live together._ ”

Steve ducks his head. “Can’t argue with that.”

“ _You haven’t dampened his light so far, and you won’t start now. Trust yourself with him, Steve._ ”

Ah, and there it is, about eighty percent of the reason for Steve’s trauma deciding to make a production of his memories now. He cannot lose Danny like he has other people in his life, cannot be the one who messes this up after being given a second chance.

“I’m working on it. Fear is a hard habit to kick. He deserves the best.”

“ _He’s in good hands, the best hands, with you—if he wasn’t, I’d fly there and whoop you myself, you understand?_ ”

It’s a not-entirely-fake threat, but Steve still smiles. “I’d be upset if you didn’t.”

They say their goodbyes just as Danny trundles through the door and throws his keys in the ceramic cat bowl, the one Grace painted in her pottery class to look like Mr. Pickles.

Danny looks more tired than usual, explaining while he washes up that they had a new member and his intro ran later than scheduled. He’s been on edge the past few days, uneasy around lots of people or traffic and holing himself up in the house instead of going outside. Despite this, his eyes are sparked at the edges around this rictus, more in the present. So Steve quietly celebrates that too by sliding an extra-large serving of chili onto the island in front of Danny once he sits down. 

He eyes the bowl, then Steve. “You trying to fatten me up?”

“Yes,” Steve says, without an ounce of humour. He still touches Danny’s ribs sometimes, the strange xylophone of their ups and down he’ll never get used to seeing.

Danny pretends to look offended but he’s smiling too, which ruins the effect. He flaps an impatient hand at Steve. “I’m only eating your from-scratch chili if you dine with me. Don’t look at me like that. And bring out the good wine, I’m beat.”

Turning to hide his grin, Steve obeys by also pouring him an extra-large glass of the leftover red tucked in the back of the fridge. Danny hasn’t outright asked for anything food related in months, so he takes the win where he can get it.

When he sets the glass down in front of Danny, he does a double take—

Danny has already helped himself to a bite, but that’s about it. He hasn’t even finished chewing, if his white lips and wide eyes are any indication, frozen in shock. He stares at the bowl, tips of his tapered ears rosy red. It’s painfully endearing and Steve would snap a picture if he knew he could do it and live to see another day.

“What?” asks Steve. “Are you just that in awe of my cooking prowess?”

Danny’s transfers his flabbergasted expression onto Steve. He can’t seem to do much more than stare and roll the sauce around in his mouth.

“If I knew cooking chili was the secret to shutting you up, I would have done it ages ago.”

Steve’s jab works, as he’d known it would, and Danny’s face goes from shot point blank to amused. His lips curve and he finally swallows the chili, though it makes his eyes water even more. He opens his mouth and Steve expects a rude, probably four letter, word to come out, but Danny coughs instead.

“Too spicy for you?” asks Steve.

“Oh no.” Danny takes a generous gulp of wine. “This chili is not spicy at all.”

Steve sniffs at Danny’s bowl. “What are you talking about? I loaded it in.”

Danny’s smile grows until it’s a smirk. “Steve…” He uses his ‘Charlie’ voice, enunciated and patronizing. “Your recipe tastes sweet and very, uh, bizarre. If you’re trying to singlehandedly open a fusion restaurant, then you nailed it.”

It’s Steve’s turn to freeze, to blink at the chili, then Danny. Sweet? He followed that online guide to the letter! He can’t possibly have gotten chili incorrect too.

Eyes crinkling, Danny points to the cupboard. “Let me guess—you couldn’t find the oregano, since we’re out, and just grabbed something without even looking.”

“No, I…”

Steve opens the cupboard and pulls out the box, just like he did while talking with Lou.

It’s cocoa powder.

What he thought was basil? Cinnamon.

“Oh Steve.”

Danny doesn’t even pretend anymore, laughing at Steve’s dumbstruck expression behind his hand. Really, he was gracious not to tell Steve outright what his sensitive taste buds probably knew was in it from the second he ate it.

“It’s not funny!” Steve defends himself over the sound of Danny mirth and his snorting into the wine.

But it is, and Steve finds himself matching it when he sees Danny’s bright eyes and the way they shine, and when he hears the palm trees swaying and when the first streetlights pop on in time with Danny’s laughter.

Danny holds up his glass, once he gets his reaction under control, and taps it against Steve’s. “To terrible chili.”

Steve listens to the glasses peal a strong note. “To beating the odds.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tani swallows, also an awful sound over the phone. Steve feels a dreaded and familiar rumble, that whatever she’s about to say will lead to sleepless nights. " _It’s how we found out about the whole thing. Steve…Steve, he accidentally walked out in front of traffic once_.”
> 
> “He…” Steve’s volume rises, sharp. “He _what_?”

‘Whisper in my ear that I am not asleep,  
Tell me a story that I recognize.  
Would you touch my face and help me believe  
That the stories that I know for myself are not lies?’

“Help Me Believe” ~ Strahan

They miss the hatching of the turtles. Steve goes down to the beach on an overcast Tuesday morning only to feel a crunch under his shoes. Pieces of their white shells halo the empty nest. At least he’d remembered to take the cardboard away over the weekend. Except, wait a second…

Danny comes out too, carrying a mug of coffee, and his eyes bug. “They all hatched except for _one_? What’s with that?”

Steve scratches scruff he hasn’t had a chance to shave yet. “It might be stillborn. That often happens with different species.”

“ _Or_ it’s the runt of the litter. Give it a day or two.”

Danny crouches beside the tiny egg hidden in the sand and umbrella’s shadow. One lone egg that didn’t hatch with its siblings. His expression is distraught for a moment before he runs a knuckle over the curve of its shell.

Steve’s eyes soften. “Sorry, Danno.”

“Are we just supposed to abandon it here?”

Steve doesn’t miss the choice of word, nor the agonized look on Danny’s face. Still a painful subject, even after all this time.

“…Unfortunately, yeah. Some animal will probably come along and scavenge it.”

“Maybe it can hatch. You don’t know.”

There are a lot of things Steve could say to that, mostly facts from the print out or stillborn birth statistics. About how turtle eggs are hard wired to all hatch at the same time, approximately forty-five days after they’re laid. That he should start facing reality sooner rather than later so they can adjust to the absence of their reptilian house guests. But Steve sees something flit across Danny’s tight, drawn features, something he’s been noticing more and more lately, and nods instead.

“Maybe, Danny. Maybe.”

* * *

Sometimes…sometimes Steve isn’t sure he’s scratched the surface of Danny at all. There are moments that confuse him, potholed in the way they stack up with what Steve thought he knew. Some behaviours are a complete blank as to where they stem from or why they’d be resurfacing with such frequency now. He’s started keeping an actual, hand written list in his pocket, of memories that seem to bother Danny sometimes—the Sarin gas nightmares, his claustrophobia, the resurfaced nerves around open water, sirens.

But there’s another side of the bullet point list. Words with lots of question marks next to them, no matter how much Steve trawls through his memory bank of Danny’s life experience and why he’d be freaked out by these stimuli.

Steve wouldn’t have even been aware of his own ignorance enough to make said list if he hadn’t woken up in Danny’s bed one night.

Only to find it completely empty.

He is unconcerned at first. Rain lashes at the windows in violent, angry water balloon bursts, a rare thunderstorm for LA, and Danny probably just got up to close some windows or check on ‘their’ egg or use the bathroom. His insomnia has never fully abated, after all.

But then something smacks the corner of the dresser—

“Ow!”

—And tumbles onto the floor. 

Steve bolts fully awake, throwing off the covers to plant both sweaty feet on the floor. At first he thinks _intruder_ , and lunges for a baseball bat behind the door, but soon understands that the groan of pain is one oft heard before. His fingers unclench from the smooth wood. He rounds the foot of the bed to see Danny levering himself up on one elbow and pushing his knees back into his chest. Squirming into a sitting position against the dresser, he winces. He’s holding his foot and though it’s much too dark to see, his limb is probably swollen from the collision.

It’s such an off-brand, ungraceful baby giraffe of a moment that in any other circumstance, backed by any other life experience, it would be cartoonish in its humour. Danny, tripping over furniture in the dark and spread-eagled like a tackled quarterback. Steve would have laughed.

But these are not normal circumstances and they’ve lived through too much for it to be funny. As it is, Steve’s heart jackhammers against the roof of his chest. He kneels down in front of Danny and it’s a return of that loathsome, queasy snake to realize this feels familiar: Night time. Rain. Crouched in front of Danny after he collapsed, in every way. Steve wishes he could tell if Danny is truly awake. Five months of no hiccups in that department and now, suddenly, this.

_Please be awake._

“You okay, Danno?”

Danny blinks, whites of his eyes the brightest thing in the room with the moon obscured by storm clouds. Some of his tension eases in blatant relief. “Steve? Oh, thank God.”

Steve frowns at the almost palpable waves of emotion pouring off him. Like Danny is drowning and Steve appeared at the exact moment he was about to go under. “‘Course it’s me. I’m right here. Did you break anything when you fell?”

“No. I’m…I’m fine.”

This time, Steve knows better. Something skids between them, something that arrests the air in Steve’s lungs and hangs Danny’s head.

There’s an experienced little voice in the back of Steve’s mind that tells him not to touch. That getting all over Danny right now will only end in waspish words and angry hands. Whatever is going on with Danny, experience dictates, is best solved by space. Lots of personal space. There have been countless times that touching Danny when he’s in the middle of mentally working something out earns Steve a slap to the arm, stomach, or a shoved shoulder, maybe a swear word snapped off around a snarl.

But Steve ignores experience in favour of gut instinct and his own inability to leave well enough alone.

He reaches out, slow, gradual enough that Danny can see his hand coming and not be startled or at least have time to push it away if he’d rather not be crowded right now. Danny does none of those things, knuckles braced in fists on either side of him where they press into the floor, jaw clenched, skin shuddering.

He merely twitches when Steve’s thumb makes it to his temple. They sit there for a few minutes, Steve stroking the dimpled skin, feeling its goosebumps, not saying anything in an effort just to be present. Danny calls himself the stable one in this partnership, the level headed, civilized voice of reason whenever Steve is about to do something stupid. And in some ways that’s true. Heaven knows Steve wouldn’t be alive today without Danny’s intervention, so many times he’s lost count by now.

It’s a lie to say that’s always the truth, however, no matter how much some might believe it. Most days, or times like this, Danny reminds Steve of a skittish animal. Wild and fiery, belonging to the wind, scared of anything that sniffs at him being controlled or manipulated. It strikes Steve sometimes, the accountability inherent in the fact that they’ve tamed each other. Every decision, no matter how small, carries more weight.

Though this moment reminds Steve of another night that haunts his dreams, the stillness reassures him. The snake coils back into its hole behind his spine. They’re fine, just a midnight blunder for he and Danny to joke about in the morning.

Then something warm touches Steve’s wrist. At first he thinks it’s Danny’s eyelashes, brushing in butterfly kisses over the underside of his arm. Wouldn’t be the first time.

But just like that, Danny’s eyes are not the brightest thing in the room.

“Hey, Danno. Hey.”

Another tear follows the first and Steve breathes out in distress. Danny hasn’t really cried about any of what happened back in Hawaii, not even in his sleep, as it’s not his first method of choice to process big moments. Steve hasn’t seen him break down at all since their first day here, on the beach chair, that thrashing night terror and those awful, soul-wrenching cries for help. He wonders if that should have been a bad sign.

Because now here Danny is, weeping in total silence. It spooks Steve a little, to see Danny break down without trying to hold it back or laugh it off.

“You had a nightmare, huh?” Steve’s croon is low, to avoid breaking this fragile suspension of time, to try and stop the tears that have managed to escape. Or to make Danny feel safe while they keep coming. If this is another panic attack, then Steve knows Danny is the opposite of him and needs to sense that he’s not alone, that someone else is here and not going anywhere. He needs to be touched and breathed on, freed from the prison of his own thoughts. 

After a moment, Danny nods. His voice is a creaky door, lacking the confident solidity of minutes earlier. “Not…I mean, I didn’t want to sleep anymore so I got up.”

Steve hears the countering of his own fears, Danny smart as a whip even half awake and hurting. _He wasn’t sleep walking._

The admission lowers Steve’s ears away from his shoulders, releases the pent up vent of air constricting his ribs. He allows himself a small, sad sigh of relief and feels Danny’s racing heartbeat through the skin on his forehead.

At least Danny doesn’t apologize to Steve this time. It disturbs Steve, though, that he hasn’t woken for this one. That Danny tried to creep away, to distance himself before Steve could hear his anguish. He’s never done such a thing since they’ve lived here.

Another red flag.

Steve wipes away a tear where it tickles his wrist and catches meager light. Danny stares woodenly at Steve’s chest, avoiding his eyes. His gaze looks a lot like it did earlier this week, that same dark dread clouding every look. A quiet sound pierces the night, Steve’s heart cracking for whatever pain Danny must be feeling, though he’s blind to its source. He wonders if this has something to do with the support group two days ago, or maybe that close call with Mina is catching up to him or…or…

“Was it a bad one?” Steve asks, trying to prompt and keep him talking. Gentle, his voice cadenced. “You wanna tell me about it?”

There’s a puerile, tantrum gust of wind against the window, toddler fists, and Danny twitches again. His arms wind around his torso, a very defensive motion. As if he’s shielding himself.

Steve’s ministrations pause. His aching frown becomes curiosity now, mingled with a low dipped brow of concern and protectiveness. Danny has never been scared of thunderstorms before, not one to get anxious over hurricanes in Hawaii or strong winds where they whistle through palm trees.

Danny’s eyes flick, from the window back to Steve. Steve suddenly can’t stand Danny’s atypical silence, the lack of words that seems to be borne of apprehension. They’re a hot air balloon, floating up, up, and away, and Steve is dizzy.

“Danny?”

“The wind it just, uh…” Danny maintains a light tone, though it sounds like it takes a lot of energy to do so. “Sounded like a car horn all of a sudden.”

Steve inches closer. Both hands frame Danny’s face now, making him both pleased and humbled that he hasn’t been slapped away from the fact that he’s essentially holding Danny’s neck upright. His cheeks are wet and clammy, and he’s still quivering faintly. If Steve listens just right, sure—the wind sounds like a train engine or a car in rush hour traffic.

_Is this leftover trauma from when he was kidnapped? Or is this about Joanna? The car accident?_

That had been its own can of worms, when Lou and Duke filled him in about what happened, when Danny got sullen and refused to talk about it, about her…when he paled getting behind the wheel of a car for the first time after it happened. Steve rolls around how many car-related things Danny has suffered and makes a mental note to add every single one to the list.

“A car horn.”

“It woke me up and now I can’t sleep.” Danny’s teeth chatter a little now too. It’s not from any sense of cold. _He’s shock-y._ “Go figure.”

“Yeah…go figure.”

The response doesn’t even remotely answer Steve’s question. But then, he worries, maybe it does. He wants to push, to demand an explanation. It wouldn’t be right, Steve knows, to expect something of Danny that Danny has never asked for when Steve suffers one of these moments, quietly crumbling like chalk. Crying to yourself until you can scrape some of the fragments back into order.

That’s Steve’s job—he _wants_ it to be his job. To be there like Danny has been for him, time and time again.

It is for this reason that he holds Danny’s face and soothes him with low words until the tears stop and his pulse decelerates, not pushing any further into the personal space bubble but not leaving him alone in it either, not for a second. It’s calm. It’s messy. It is, at least, a quiet moment that belongs solely to the two of them, outside of the pressure of time. Danny doesn’t divert the moment with a profusion of words, like the old Danny would have, unable to do much more than shiver and shake and cast wary eyes at the window. At some point, his jaw unclenches and he leans his head into Steve’s arm. Heat explodes in his stomach at the display of trust and he has to swallow a few times. Real butterfly kisses tickle his wrist this time. It’s a wordless signal that Danny is tired, that he’s had enough of sitting on the floor.

Steve hesitates. In all seriousness, he is tempted just to pick Danny up and carry him to bed, save them both the trouble, but Danny isn’t the kind of guy who will allow it and Steve knows better than to put what he desires first.

So he takes a hand off Danny’s cheek and holds it out instead.

Danny eyes him, the hand, the storm, all of it. “I don’t want to sleep, Steve.”

“We don’t have to. You can just lay down and rest.”

“…We?”

“Yes,” says Steve, rock firm. “If you stay up, so do I.”

That seems to be the clincher for Danny, who rides Steve’s pull to his feet. To Steve’s alarm, he actually sways a bit—Steve grabs at his shoulders—before hobbling over to his side of the bed.

Their first night with actual beds, all those months ago, Danny tried to claim the right hand spot due to its ‘plush versus firmness ratio.’ Steve quickly shut that down, bodily sliding Danny over so he is now, at all times, between Steve and the wall. Anyone who comes into the room will have to deal with Steve first. Because of this, when he lays down on his back, it’s with an adjacent view of the door.

He doesn’t touch Danny or pull him close in the usual pattern, content to listen to Danny curl up on his side, breathing through a few more spilled tears. At least he’d lain down facing Steve. It’s a greater concession than he expected, and he’s not stupid enough to think they’ve solved whatever this is.

“You in any pain?”

“Just a stubbed ankle.”

“Do you need ice for it?”

Danny buries his face in his pillow. “No.”

There’s something broken and final in the word, so Steve stops talking. He doesn’t know what it means, this space between their bodies and the fear of car horns that Danny apparently has developed. What bothers Steve more, though, is that he missed when it happened. He missed how the pieces fit together. He thought they were doing well but the tiny pieces are there that something is niggling at Danny, subtle, yet stitched together in not so much a red flag…as maybe a white one.

Danny is a cat, a fact Steve _does_ know for sure. Smother him and he’ll step away, a whirlwind clawed creature, lithe in his fury.

Leave him alone, however…

Steve’s eyes are closed and his body thrums with loose sleep, though light and alert to keep his promise, by the time there’s a shuffle, a wet breath—and a hand clenched loosely in Steve’s T-shirt. Shaky fingers play with the fabric until eventually they wind down. Steve smiles.

Danny’s not truly asleep, but his eyes are closed when Steve peeks over.

“G’night, Danno,” he whispers.

Danny scoots closer so his head is on Steve’s pillow and his forehead is melded to Steve’s shoulder. “Goodnight, Steve. Thanks.”

* * *

“ _Don’t tell me Danny spilled the beans on what you’re doing wrong. That would be no fun._ ”

Steve, despite his chagrin, huffs. “He told you about this bread making mystery too?”

“ _I’ve received all the juicy details, including your dramatic introduction to the neighbourhood kids_.”

“What a blabbermouth,” Steve says, not really joking but not really complaining either. He loves this about Danny, after so many years of hearing him prattle. He tucks his cellphone between his ear and right shoulder while kneading dough. It’s somehow flatter than ever. Drat. “You guys still working on renos? Does it feel like home yet?”

“ _That’s my line_.” A spoon clinking echoes over the line, along with Junior’s background voice. Then Tani makes a considering sound. “ _We almost flew Eddie over to surprise you._ ”

“You did?” Steve’s hands pause around the dough. “Why?”

“ _He had some trouble adjusting without you at first and we thought he should be with his humans, but over the summer he bonded with us more._ ”

A faint grin alights on Steve’s face. “You let him sleep on the bed, don’t you?”

“ _Drove Junior crazy at first_ ,” Tani confirms, with no small amount of wicked pleasure. “ _Now I think he might love that dog more than me._ ”

“You get used to it. Did you finally finish that roof?”

“ _Final reno, yeah! After we re-did the den, Junior replaced all the shingles_.”

It’s always a blossoming thing in Steve’s chest, thinking about how the mausoleum of his old heritage is inhabited by new, energetic life. That out of the ashes of his broken family a happier one will grow. Is _already_ growing. “I’m glad—some of those were rotted clean through.”

“ _Danny knocked off a few back in May._ ” Tani laughs. “ _Junior joked that it made his job easier._ ”

Any warm emotions freeze under the sudden ice in Steve’s chest. He drops his measuring cup of flour with a clatter and it takes a few tries to speak. He tries not to make any assumptions. “Tani…why was Danny up on the roof?”

There’s a surprised silence, broken abruptly when Tani sets down her mug with a strident _cler-thunk_. “ _I thought he told you._ ”

“Told me what?”

“ _It’s not really my place—_ ”

“What? What shouldn’t I know?”

“ _I mean that I think Danny should be the one to—_ ”

“Tani, please.”

Another silence, this one crackling with her sharp sigh. “ _Steve, look, Danny wasn’t in a great place for a while there. He didn’t give up exactly, but he thought everyone had moved on without him, his job, his kids, his ex-wife_ …”

She doesn’t say _“you”_ but Steve hears it anyway.

“ _I don’t think he saw much point in it all anymore._ ” Tani’s voice quiets. “ _There were a few incidents during his sleepwalking episodes, climbing up on high surfaces and runs ins with cars and stuff like that. I’m sure there was a lot more we don’t know about._ ”

Steve grips the countertop in both hands and realizes, like the flash of a distant lighthouse, that his knees are giving out. He stumbles for a chair and just makes it. Lou shared some of the details with him during that frantic phone call, how Danny wasn’t eating well, how he slept walk long distances or to iffy places, but nothing like this. His hands tremor.

“Cars?” Steve asks, not wanting to, yet knowing he owes it to Danny. He thinks of the nightmares, the storm three nights ago, Danny’s recent wariness of driving in rush hour traffic, and his gut swoops like an anchor as the pieces clash together in perfect synchronisation.

Tani swallows, also an awful sound over the phone. Steve feels a dreaded and familiar rumble, that whatever she’s about to say will lead to sleepless nights. “ _It’s how we found out about the whole thing. Steve…Steve, he accidentally walked out in front of traffic once._ ”

“He…” Steve’s volume rises, sharp. “He _what_?”

“ _At least we think it was an accident. He was sleepwalking and a car nearly hit him. The woman, along with a few other drivers, had to swerve at the last second. If she hadn’t had such fast reflexes…Danny wouldn’t have made it. He’d have been struck full on and died instantly._ ”

With his unique, if rather insane, life experience, Steve has been punched lots of times. Lots and _lots_ of times. On the jaw, the nose (so many nose fractures), the back of his cranium, his stomach, that one time a thug got in a lucky shot to the corner of his eye and nearly blinded him. He’d seen stars for _days_. There’s always that rush of air right before flesh connects with flesh, then the pressure hitting in precise detail on veins, splitting it open in a lurid bruise or goose egg.

But this is a different beast entirely—this is being punched in slow motion so Steve feels every inch of marrow splintering, as the blood of regret and horror flotsam up between his teeth. They gush in metallic splashes, rushing through his nose, behind his eyes. And he has never been punched quite so hard in his life. The very bones in his head smart and Steve, also distantly, feels the first tears slide down his cheeks.

If Steve had a dollar for every time he’s been punched, he could open another restaurant. And for all that, it can’t hold a candle to this pain.

“Can I…” Steve swipes at his face, not that it does much good other than smearing gunky flour everywhere. His voice is barely above a whisper and moisture recedes in his mouth, as if he’s about to vomit. “Can I call you back later?”

“ _Of course_.” Tani’s crying a little bit too. “ _And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I never wanted you to find out this way. You should have found out from Danny, not that he shares that well either. You take care of him, McGarrett._ ”

Steve almost laughs, because at this rate he doesn’t plan on letting Danny out of sight ever again. Instead he says an incoherent goodbye, not even sure of the words coming out of his mouth, and jumps to his feet. His whole body judders, quakes, _falls apart._ He reels from the blow, from every last syllable ringing in his ears. They’ve cracked his skull, hung him on the ropes by his own ignorance.

He’d seen Danny that night, obviously. Had known when he found him on the side of the road, by the dull glint in his eye and lack of interest in food, that something went very wrong. But Steve hadn’t _understood_. Not until the whole thing coalesced into one giant billboard, right this second. It scrapes off the last verdigris of his pride. 

_Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t he_ tell _me?_

But this too, like the nightmare, Steve thinks he might already know the answer to. And maybe he’s known for a lot longer than his conscious mind will admit, by the way Danny hid his pain over and over again so he could be there for what his family needed and, worst of all, they kept _letting_ him do so. It’s a habit for Danny, and habits that protect the heart are hard to break.

Steve looks outside but their beach is empty, then downstairs. Agitated, he paces there until he hears feet clomp down the steps. Danny’s got his head down, staring at a photo Grace must have sent to his phone. Mutters fall from his lips in the usual endearing pattern of talking to himself.

The minute Danny makes it on even ground and is within arm’s reach, Steve grabs his shirt, gathering him close. The motion ends up so forceful it lifts Danny’s feet off the floor for a second.

“Hey!” Danny’s voice is muffled in Steve’s chest, which he whaps. “Give a guy some warning, would you? This is the weirdness I’m always telling my therapist about. We can’t all have…”

But then he feels the wide, violent shakes running through Steve’s frame and immediately reciprocates. He tucks the phone in his pocket and his arms loop around Steve’s back. The tempo of his tone smooths out while he pats a bony spot below Steve’s shoulder blades. “It’s okay, Steve. You’re home, you’re safe. No explosions. It’s all good, I promise.”

Steve closes his eyes in Danny’s hair and doesn’t bother correcting him on what caused the reaction. He wraps as much of himself as he can around Danny, curving inward so he can envelope this man through sheer force of will. It ends with his hand cupped around the back of Danny’s head. The shape of it is healthy, unmarred, a contradiction to every imagined picture now branded in Steve’s mind—and will be as long as he lives—of Danny on the ground, pâte splattered open. Or his body contorted after being struck by a car.

This is possibly the tightest Steve has ever held Danny but it still doesn’t stop his grief. Huge tears continue to waterfall down his skin, the bridge of his nose, salty stains wetting the crown of Danny’s head. The compassion and pain inside of Steve is a concussive snap in his chest.

Danny must be able to hear silent things, or maybe just Steve, because his fingers switch from grounding taps to slow, caressed circles on Steve’s back. After a while, a good five minutes of hugging, Danny’s reassuring chatter dies away. And he simply holds Steve. Or lets Steve hold him. Steve isn’t sure which anymore and in some ways will never know, because they’re a twined thing now. Plaited, woven in a way that causes destruction to separate.

“I’m so sorry.” It can’t even be classified a whisper, Steve’s hoarse, tortured words. Something inside of him wails, demanding an outlet. “So sorry, Danno…”

There’s no thought behind the action. Absolutely no pondering in Steve’s mind for what he does next—

He kisses the messy, now flour-dappled spot on top of Danny’s head where his hair meets skin. A quick, chaste, drenched kiss.

And the grief immediately settles. Steve’s knees threaten to give out again, this time in some kind of super storm dispel of catharsis. The stars are back behind his eyes.

Danny pulls away, though Steve doesn’t let him get very far, clutching the back of his shirt in desperate fistfuls, worried that he crossed some unspoken line. This isn’t territory they’ve ever traversed and he broke his promise to ask first.

The look in Danny’s eyes is something else new, something Steve has never seen before and can’t even hope to read. Danny doesn’t ask what Steve is sorry for, doesn’t demand an explanation, doesn’t deflect the kiss with a joke, doesn’t shove him off. No, Danny Williams always tells the truth with his hands.

Right now, they reach up and clean Steve’s face. The tenderness breaks him down more, but Danny just swipes these tears away too.

“I’m right here,” he whispers, a direct echo of what Steve said to him after the nightmare.

He is, and he’ll stay that way if it takes every last breath in Steve’s body. He’s here, in one piece, healing and saturated with peace and well rested.

_He didn’t jump. He’s alive, and he still trusts you._

Steve captures one of his hands. “I’m not leaving, Danny. Do you hear me? Not ever again.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

Danny examines the death grip knit around his fingers, as if Steve is balling the hand up to keep it safe. “I’m not…I’m not leaving either. We’ve both been abandoned enough.”

Steve wrenches him back in with rough arms, knowing he’s holding the one thing that makes getting up in the morning worth it, who has said the same of him more than once.

So lost in the relief of it all, Steve almost misses the sensation at first. It’s soft, trying not to be noticed. As if Danny’s not sure such a thing is permitted:

A kiss, tentative, is planted right over his heart.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danny doesn’t get up right away or go track down his keys. And now he’s tentatively rubbing Steve’s bare knee with his knuckles, feather light. Steve freezes, opening his mouth. But Danny beats him to it—
> 
> “Love you, Steve.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Catharsis and fluff time, baby!

‘Now bursting forth in splendor  
Are the blossoms of second tries,  
Because dreams that bear the mark of love  
Are dreams that never die.’

“Moving Forward” ~ Colony House

Steve catches Danny studying him at times after that. A divot between his brows but a perplexed smile on his face.

The fact Steve is touchy for a few days after the revelation does not help, unable to sleep alone and unable to let Danny drive anywhere without him. He hugs Danny more often and Danny seems to be making a conscious effort to stay within eyesight. If he’s reading on the beach while Steve cooks, he’ll trundle inside and sit at the island instead. Like sleeping arrangements, they don’t talk about it but it works.

Their incessant words die down.

Steve, however, doesn’t think they’ve ever heard each other clearer.

* * *

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Steve asks one night, when the question finally becomes too hot for the coals of his mouth to temper and he’s vibrating at the revulsion of it all again. He crouches down in front of Danny’s beach chair. The sun has finished its setting performance and Danny is sleep rumpled, but the intensity in Steve’s voice yanks him back to true awareness.

“Are you going to sit in your chair like a normal person?”

Steve’s jaw works at the avoidance of his question. “Danny—”

“Because that can’t be comfortable.”

“Danny, why did you hide it?”

There is no need for Danny to ask what Steve means, not with the fresh tears looming in Steve’s eyes and the possessive way he clutches Danny’s ankle, the one he’d bumped that night after the storm, that still has a bruise wrapped around the outside. The air between them fizzes this time in the face of such pain, though admittedly from different causes.

They haven’t talked about what Tani said, not directly in the sense of climbing on rooftops and walking in front of cars and Danny thinking that he doesn’t deserve any better—but despite their bantering, they’ve never really needed words to communicate. Danny figured it out the first time Steve woke up from a nightmare about it a few days ago.

Because he understands that while Danny has absolute faith in Steve’s commitment to making this work, that he’s not about to up and leave at the drop of a hat, this is not really the fundamental issue of the thing. This is not what has made Danny so tense and jittery lately. This is not the root of where his own panic attacks come from.

“Oh.” Danny’s own features twist in surprise, the genuine article. It causes a matching knife twist in Steve’s chest. Danny truly doesn’t understand how drop dead horrifying what he lived through is, that his subconscious came _this close_ to giving up in the search for family and support. In the search for Steve. “I didn’t mean to hide what happened with the sleepwalking. I just didn’t think it mattered now, at this point.”

Steve’s grip switches to Danny’s knee. He breathes hard through his nose until he’s sure his voice will come out even. “Danny…Danny, it will always—” Steve’s voice breaks and he tries again. “ _Always_ matter.”

_You_ _will always matter._

Danny slips his fingers under Steve’s palm, and the clasp is so ironclad that it takes a few clumsy tries. Now Steve’s gripping the back of _his_ hand.

“It’s over, Steve. What happened, it’s done. We’ve forgiven each other.”

“But the nightmares still bother you.”

Danny shakes his head. “You leaving is not what troubles me.”

“Then what…?”

“Sometimes my mind…it’s a mean, cruel bully who reminds me that the almost-being-struck-by-a-car incident represented being _alone_. I felt unwanted.”

Steve accepts the thumb linked around his, hoping to show how ludicrous it is that Danny would ever go unwanted. “You struggle with being alone?”

Danny sags with a small grin, something tender. “No, Steve, not on your life. Quite literally, because the longest we’ve spent apart in the last few months is _maybe_ eight hours.”

Steve concedes this with a quirked brow.

“Sometimes…” Danny goes quiet. “Sometimes when I’m feeling scared or overwhelmed after a tough day, my mind takes me to my darkest places. Like you with the ambush in Kandahar.”

Steve’s eyes are black and serious, boring into Danny’s. By contrast, Danny is open and lax, letting Steve read whatever he wants in his face.

“Like being abandoned.”

“I’ve had lots of those moments, so my brain just kind of jukeboxes the whole thing and picks one at random. Insert a quarter, get a nightmare.” Danny’s attempt at levity almost works, until the words sink in and Steve realizes the price they’ve both paid for what they have now. How fake that levity is in this moment.

Further proving this, Danny thumbs quickly at his eyes. “I’m not used to happy endings, Steve. Or at least ones that last without getting shattered a few years in. My brain is still figuring out what to do with this one. That it’s not an illusion or a trick, that I don’t have to…to…”

He trails off but this time Steve doesn’t try to fill the silence. They both sit there, listening to the waves, their rhythmic crash of the moon’s gravitational pull on the earth. There is wind, there is the cry of a gull far overhead, and there is Danny Williams swallowing convulsively until his voice comes out with more croaked tone than breath:

“That I don’t have to earn it or buy the love offered here.”

The words are a water gun of pure acid squirted straight into Steve’s chest cavity. He flinches back, recoiling, as if that will abate the sheer disgust of this statement. Finally, _finally_ , Danny’s behaviour the past or so month clicks.

Steve’s eyes burn too. “You’re afraid that by telling me when you feel down or overwhelmed, it’ll chase that happiness away. That you have to be whatever I need without reciprocation or you’ll lose this.”

It’s not a question and Danny doesn’t deny it. In fact, he’s silent for a good long while this round, staring out over the waves that are too dark to see by now and melodic swaying of the sandy grasses. Danny’s moved his chair a little so that it borders the nest, guarding that one lone egg with a faithful devotion that hurts like a tack under the skin. Small, but piercing. His thumb tightens around Steve’s.

Just that touch irons out the hoarse, upset rasp of Steve’s voice. It comes out smooth, sad, dripping over the edges with love. “I’m so sorry you’re struggling with that lie, Danno.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Probably not, but Steve takes an oath with himself right then and there that he’ll be more alert for those kinds of days, for how it might torment Danny’s sleep and subconscious thoughts. He’ll give Danny more opportunities to talk about how he’s feeling, to see the permanence of their life now, at least in relation to each other. It’s hit Steve so many times in the last few days, that Danny nearly died, long before Steve found him on the side of the road. He’s gotten used to people leaving, to death, to never having someone truly be there—until Danny. History cannot be allowed to repeat itself.

_I almost lost him._

“You don’t have to earn it, Danno.” Steve jostles their hands to reinforce his point. “I love you because you’re _you_. Nothing is going to change that.”

Danny might as well be a statue.

The burn spreads down Steve’s arms, his spine, into his heavy heartbeat. “Do you understand? You’re so loved, and not because you bought it from me.”

Danny swallows. Once, twice. Then he finally meets Steve’s eyes head on. “I know that in my head. My heart will get it, eventually.”

Because the beach is deserted and it’s dusky, and Danny looks all cozy and domestic snuggled up in Steve’s Navy sweater, sleeves still stained with the ‘fusion’ chili, and because he’s having trouble breathing around the hot lump in his throat with the _need_ for Danny to grasp how much Steve cares about him and always will…

Steve lifts Danny’s palm and pecks it before he can overthink the impulse. His lips and nose brush over the soft underskin of Danny’s fingers as he finishes.

Danny stiffens a little, more out of uncertainty. He doesn’t look distressed, just confused. His pulse is fast now underneath Steve’s thumb.

“Is this going to become a recurring thing with you?” Danny asks, blunt. “Because I’m a grown man who’s barely even done that to a woman, let alone had it done to me.”

Reverent, Steve replaces the limb on Danny’s knee. He shrugs. “Maybe. Haven’t decided.”

“Oh,” says Danny again. And he’s baffled, but with that same dot of colour along his ears that was present the day he made Steve pancakes. He’s starting to understand what that means too, all these little shards that make up the mosaic of his best friend. “Okay.”

* * *

There is a cosmic law, somewhere, that says things break on the _exact_ day you need them. Without fail. It’s Steve turn to cook a nice Saturday dinner for Danny and Grace, something with lots of carbs and actual spices—he’s labelled them with extra large print this time—and that, alas, needs to be simmered in lots of—

“Argh!” Steve flinches back from the spray of water above him. He towels off his face for the umpteenth time. “Stupid pipe with its stupid leak, that happens to spring right when I need to make my stupid internet recipe…”

His grumbling devolves into more creative epithets against their kitchen drain pipe while he wrenches at it. On his back in the open cupboard under the sink, Steve is just glad he hasn’t changed like Danny left to do, still in his running clothes that are more than welcome to get soggy. If only he can figure out where the loose connection is coming from, then he could tighten it and be done with this hiccup.

Both long legs are curled up, but he stretches his left out until it touches the base of the island to alleviate some of the pressure on his back. The lip of the narrow cupboard digs into his spine, even though he’d moved their compost bin and dish soap bottles out of the way.

“One more twist ought to do it—”

One more does _not_ do the trick and Steve swears while squinting past an even bigger slosh of water on his shirt.

While stemming the leak with another towel, Steve listens to the soft tread of Danny’s socks patter down the round staircase. He tunes them out when the leak springs in a second spot, focused on not flooding their kitchen on tonight, of all nights.

There’s a brush of fabric on his outstretched leg, and Steve spares a glance to see two pineapple polka dotted socks stop next to his shin. He waits for the quip, the nattering voice of Danny’s smug amusement to wheedle about how Steve can stop a terrorist and this leaky sink has him beat.

But Danny says nothing for a few minutes, his toes arced in tense loops.

“Pass me the torque wrench?” Steve asks, because if Danny’s going to stand there in silence, he might as well be a useful plumber’s assistant.

Danny immediately grabs it off the island and crouches down. He’s in a blue dress shirt, tucked, in keeping with his classic philosophy that his daughter should see a man, even her father, make an effort to look nice when taking her to a nice meal. Even if that nice meal is at their house and Grace already knows how special she is to them after years of this.

“Thanks.” Steve sets down the wrench he has been using, a mechanic’s tool, he sees now. He twists the torque wrench instead and what do you know—this time it works. Or, at least it stops the bottom leak, though not the one at the top. He gets ready to fix this one as well.

“You’re picking up Grace in a bit? Just give me a sec and I’ll drive with you.”

No answer. Danny inhales a strange, short breath through his nose.

Steve’s hands slow down around the pipe. Is this a panic attack? Is he trying to ask for help? “Danny?”

Danny doesn’t get up right away or go track down his keys. And now he’s tentatively rubbing Steve’s bare knee with his knuckles, feather light. Steve freezes, opening his mouth. But Danny beats him to it—

“Love you, Steve.”

The words come out gauche, lacking any kind of finesse. They are blocked, all right angles and gawky spirants. Danny looks away when Steve stares up at him, like he’s been caught doing something embarrassing.

And it hits Steve like a sack of wet bricks, that Danny has been working up his nerve all this time, that this is the first time Danny has ever initiated saying it since they moved. It’s a good thing Steve is already off his feet—he knows if this happened while he was standing, he’d already be collapsed on the floor at the sluice of affection Danny’s words slam him with.

_He feels safe enough to say it. He knows._

The monumental weight of this moment will stick with Steve until he dies. He’s glad suddenly for his wet face, blinking up at the pipe even though he can’t see it anymore through the blur. “Love you too, Danno.”

* * *

Despite the fact that it’s the beginning of November, it’s still hot enough to cook an egg. The heat wave is forecasted well into next week. Because of this, Steve doesn’t have energy to do much more than lay around and read, sometimes not even that. They’d ended up cancelling the barbeque plans with Chin because of it, and he didn’t sound too sorry on the phone. The forecast next week is cooler, so they’re all looking forward to a rain check.

This afternoon he hasn’t made it down the beach for a swim, instead stretched out on the hammock. The wind is strong enough to push at it, enough for him to see why Danny’s so in love with this spot. Danny is finishing a shower after de-weeding their front garden. Steve closes his eyes into the breeze, relishing the way it cools him off.

He’s just about to follow the siren call of sleep when the hammock jack knifes. Its bucking nearly throws him out.

Steve’s eyes fly open. “What in the—”

And there is one Danny Williams climbing onto the hammock. With absolutely zero grace. He hasn’t even bothered to dry his hair, not that he needs to under the blistering sun that does it for him. Blond wisps whisper against Steve’s chin when Danny finally gets comfortable and stretches out beside him. The hammock finally settles, gently swinging the two men back and forth.

It’s an unprecedented moment that surprises Steve. Danny loves proximity, sure. They both do after the brief scare of being apart. But not necessarily _intimacy._ Steve is the cuddle-initiator in their relationship and Danny has never done this before. Usually at night, Danny just makes himself comfortable and lets Steve octopus around him however he wants, but he doesn’t really hug back, doesn’t seek Steve out with his arms in the way Steve himself is now notorious for.

But here he is, melded to Steve like thermoformed plastic.

It’s a week for firsts.

So Steve is careful with the arm he circles around Danny’s shoulders in reply, not sure what prompted the uncharacteristic move. “Hey, you.”

Danny’s only response is to shift onto his side, so his nose is pressed into Steve’s T-shirt. Somehow, despite the heat, he’s _still_ wearing that red pullover Steve never got back. He’s also wearing his own board shorts, but the way his hands are hidden in the sleeves broadcasts that this is not an ocean day.

Steve plays with wheat-like strands on the top of Danny’s head. They feel like Charlie’s, only coarser and longer. He checks for any shaking, if this could be another episode or a bad-brain day, as Grace calls them, but Danny’s body is lax, putty against Steve’s side. He goes so far as to verify this, by wrapping his other arm around Danny’s torso, just to see if he’ll feel trapped.

Danny sighs out a content noise that tickles Steve’s skin.

And promptly goes to sleep.

Steve blinks up at the palm trees, confused with his sudden armful of Danny. He rummages under the sweater for Danny’s naval and the man’s pulse is as slow as Steve’s ever felt it.

Danny is really just…that relaxed.

They nap for an hour or so, until the sun isn’t so overpowering and they should probably be eating supper. Birds chatter overhead. There’s a distant splash that is most likely one of the dolphins who live off the coast of their beach. Steve tears up at times, still seeing stars at this display of trust on Danny’s part. He breathes in the unique scent that is Danny, hands a little wobbly where they comb through his hair, how he counts on Steve to be on watch while he’s conked out.

Serenity. There’s that word again. A tear slips down Steve’s cheek into the dimples of his smile, birthed by peace and delivered through the sheer catharsis of this moment.

Danny’s always had a scary, pre-sentient ability to read Steve, no matter how far apart they are. He wakes up even though Steve’s tears are silent and no more fall. Danny intertwines his hand with the one on his stomach.

Steve sniffs. “I figured out what was wrong with my bread.”

Danny’s lips curve upwards, an action Steve feels against his chest rather than sees. “Did you now?”

“Yeah. Isabelle lent us salt and sugar when we first moved, right?”

“Mhmm. You’re getting warmer.”

Steve smiles too. “Except she didn’t think to label them, so both white powders are in clear Tupperware boxes with red lids. I switched them by accident—I’ve been using salt instead of sugar as a dough starter this whole time.”

“Ding, ding, ding.” Slurred with sleep, Danny’s voice is still drier than ever. “Give the man a prize. You also tend to bake on cooler, overcast days.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not necessarily, but it makes it harder for the dough to keep warm and rise.”

“Ah. I did not know that.”

“Professor Williams, at your service.”

Steve playfully tweaks his ear. “You’re so dopey when you’re half asleep.”

Danny opens his mouth with visible intent to verbally flip him off, when he suddenly closes it. Tilts his head up.

“What?” Steve listens. “What is it?”

But then he hears it too—a scratching sound. It’s faint, almost inaudible, yet there’s definitely something snapping about ten feet away from the hammock. Steve scowls. Those pesky flattop crabs must be at it again, the ones that keep climbing and scratching his chair. Once or twice he’s even come close to sitting on them by accident. He’ll have to butter the legs or something so they can’t crawl up.

Danny gasps fully awake, jumping out so fast Steve pushes a hand on the ground to keep the hammock from rolling. Danny’s eyes are wide, heartbeat a constellation of pings under Steve’s thumb where he hasn’t let go.

“What are you—”

“It’s hatching. Steve, the egg—”

Trepidation festers high in Steve’s stomach, at the damage control he’s going to have to do in about five seconds when Danny sees that it’s a crab responsible for the noise. He follows Danny down to the beach with a grimace.

“Danny, try not to be too disappointed, alright?”

“Steve—”

“I’m serious. The egg is dead, Danno.”

Steve should know better by now, he really should. He learned long ago not to doubt his partner’s instincts and that lesson comes flooding back when he squats next to Danny. Just in time to watch a thumbnail-sized beak crack through the egg’s shell.

The beak is pure white.

Steve gapes while Danny pants out an elated cry, eyes as bright as Steve’s now.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Sshh!” Danny shushes him but he looks so ecstatic Steve doesn’t have the heart to snipe. At first Danny reaches back as if for his phone, in his pocket, but he thinks better of it. Something about recording the moment feels disrespectful. “Here it comes!”

Neither of them dare touch the egg or assist its progress, though both want to. Steve can’t tell whether he enjoys watching this new life fight out into the world or Danny’s joy more. It’s there in ribbons across Danny’s face, from his crinkled eyes, to the broad smile, to the sand he can’t help moving out of the way to make the turtle’s path easier.

The egg _thunks_ onto its side, recapturing Steve’s attention.

And out pops a little crème coloured head.

Its large, marble red eyes see the sun. Dappled flippers windmill out next. Though the turtle looks straight up at Steve and Danny for a thoughtful minute, the first real sight of its second’s old life, it quickly locks onto the lapping waves in front of Steve’s chair with high tide. There’s a peek of albino shell, with some sort of carapace deformity that makes the square, patchy pattern bleed into itself, like a golden kaleidoscope. It’s breathtaking.

“Can’t we just carry—”

“No,” says Steve, firm. He knows Danny knows this. If it dies trying to get out, then it dies. That’s how the ecosystem works. “You’ve been patient this long. Give him or her a minute.”

They do, and though it’s hard to see the baby struggle, eventually it breaks free. The creature is scrawnier than its siblings, oddly shaped back feet paddling. This one really is the runt of its litter. Steve has never witnessed anything like it in his life nor read about such a case, an ultra rare albino turtle hatching almost two weeks late and still ending up alive. Its chances of survival are not great, not with its stark colouring, but if they can beat the odds, so can this baby.

Suddenly, their turtle is off.

This forces Danny to move to the side so it can maneuver. Not quite fast enough—the turtle flops over his toes. Then it fades away into the surf, enveloped by a cap of buttercup yellow foam and swimming off to seaweed on the ocean floor where it will spend its first few months of life.

Danny’s voice oozes with wonder. “I can’t believe we just got to watch an albino baby hatch. Isn’t that one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen?”

“Yeah.” Steve keeps his gaze on Danny. He’s content, and he is whole. The sun flashes molten sapphire in his eyes now, a ring of gold off his hair. “It really is.”

* * *

(That sea turtle most definitely imprints on Danny and Steve.

It returns the following June, a white blob flapping around Danny in the shallows. Swimming out to the breakers with Steve. The two men can only stare at this familiar, opaline shell, though it’s much larger now.

Then their turtle is gone.

The catch is that Danny imprints on everything too and so he names the turtle Hau, a Hawaiian word for snow or mother-of-pearl that Steve wasn’t even aware he knew. More surprises.

Hau visits next year, then the year after that, and the year after that…)


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The back of his right hand, trapped by Danny’s serpentine grip, rests against the skin of his partner’s stomach.
> 
> _Th-thump…th-thump…th-thump…_
> 
> Steve watches Danny fall asleep and yeah, he’s got a lot to learn—but maybe they can teach other. He’s looking forward to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for coming on this angsty, domestic journey with me! The H50 fandom has been welcoming and kind in ways that continue to surprise me (and encourage me to keep writing. :D)
> 
> Peace and love to you all!

‘How could it be so, that a heart this full  
Could burst wide open, be re-awoken?  
Little did I know what a simple thought  
Could set in motion, a drop in the ocean—  
I don’t have to live without you anymore.’

“You” ~ A Great Big World

“Danny, I don’t know how to tell you this.” Steve drops his keys in their Mr. Pickles bowl and shuts the door with his foot. “But you’ve got a problem.”

“I don’t have a problem.”

“When I left this morning for an oil change and to run errands, you were _still_ on that thing. Do you even know how long it’s been?”

Danny sits on the couch, right where Steve said goodbye to him with a hand in his hair, but this time he’s upside down. His calves hook over the back of the couch and his body is slanted towards the floor. The way his head suddenly appears at Steve’s question, meerkat style, is so endearing Steve steals a picture of it.

Danny squints. “Two…”

“Five,” Steve talks over him. “I left _five_ hours ago. It’s three in the afternoon, man. Have you even eaten today?”

“…Maybe.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

Steve plunks his bags on the counter so they make as much noise as possible. Part of him wants to be frustrated and part of him is endlessly amused by the whole thing. He digs around the fridge for the other half of a roast beef and mustard sandwich he didn’t finish yesterday.

“I’m good at this stuff.” Danny’s thumbs fly. His tongue flips to the side of his mouth when Steve rests his forearms against the back of the couch, on either side of Danny’s shins, and leans over him. Steve takes a picture of that too. “I used to be _so_ good at this stuff.”

Steve waves the sandwich under Danny’s nose. “Smell that? It’s your sanity calling before it’s too late.”

“Charlie loves this game.” Danny ignores him, or perhaps he thinks that’s a reasonable counter-argument. Of course the Switch is about Charlie. Steve should have figured this out sooner—and Grace owes him ten bucks. “He said he wants to play it with me when he comes next month. I can’t _not_ be good at it.”

“Why not just wait until he gets here and have him teach you?” Steve gives up trying to get Danny to eat for now. “That sounds a hell of a lot easier than borrowing Dylan’s console. I’m shocked he was nice enough to lend it to you for this long as is.”

He weaseled this information out of Dylan one day in the yard, using tried and true Navy leverage techniques. (A whole box of cake pops.)

There’s a taffy-stretched pause, filled only by the sound of Danny’s character trying to climb a magical mountain or something and the plastic clicking of the Switch. And guilt. Lots of guilt.

Steve’s eyes narrow. “Danno? What did you do?”

“Well, technically Charlie doesn’t _own_ this game yet.” Danny somehow manages to look away from the screen at Steve and still have his female avatar dash in mid air. Impressive. “Rachel’s buying it for him for Christmas, because he saw people playing it online.”

“Okay…”

“And I maybe told him that I already knew how to beat it, final level and everything.” Danny winces, though whether it’s in response to his own words or his character dying yet again is unclear. “I promised to teach _him_.”

Steve is torn between being appalled and laughing. He goes with laughter. Still, he’s incredulous. “You lied to Charlie about knowing how to play this random game?”

“Come on, Steve. I have to get my cool dad points in where I can, now that I don’t see him as much.”

Steve’s tone lowers, eyes hooded. He squeezes Danny’s bare ankle, where he’s rolled his jeans up on another sweltering day. “You already are a cool dad.”

“You say that now, but wait until he grows up and beats me at Pacman.”

“Is that the griping of a Triple Banana champion I hear?”

“I know where you sleep,” Danny snaps back. “Mainly ‘cause you hog all our blankets at night.”

Steve is glad Danny’s eyes are back on the screen, so that he cannot see how wide and shiny Steve’s are.

‘Our.’

The word catches him off guard. He could bally back, something along the lines of what a load of bull that is. _Danny_ is the one who perpetually runs cold and rolls himself into a blanket burrito on stormy nights.

But Steve just grips Danny’s ankle again, his throat thick.

He regains his composure to plop the sandwich on Danny’s chest, so that he has to lift the Switch higher to see. “Eat that—every last bite—or I’m confiscating your little quest of lies and giving it back to Dylan.”

“Heartless. Just heartless, that you won’t even let a man learn something new for his child.”

“Less talking.” Steve pushes off the couch with a flick at the sole of Danny’s foot. “More eating.”

His phone buzzes in his pocket, which is a darn shame because just then Danny’s leg retreats at the touch—his feet are ticklish, something else Steve never knew—and Steve is looking forward to lording that over him. Maybe using it to torture him until he gives up the Switch.

Luckily, it’s just a text. Although…it’s from Hetty, who Steve never gave his number.

The message is short yet still nuanced, based on how much it doesn’t say: ‘ _AID, ETA twenty minutes.’_

AID. Steve frowns, remembering the term from his SEAL support group. _Agent in Distress_.

“Danny, you know that clause that allows us to live here?”

Steve’s hedged tone trails off. He’s uneasy about the text, about if either he or Danny are ready for something like this when they just trekked through the woods of their own trauma. They’ve made it out the other side into daylight, but just barely, and there are still issues they both need to work on.

Danny— _finally_ hallelujah—pauses the game and sets it down. His eyes are troubled too. “Is someone coming?”

“Yeah.” Steve takes stock of their house. He’s glad he thought to make the other two beds upstairs. Danny will get the first floor to himself. “Hetty didn’t say if he or she is injured, just that they’re coming soon.”

Danny taps Steve’s chest with his toe. “You good with this?”

“I guess so. Should I have the first aid kit on hand?”

“Probably.” Biting off a corner of the sandwich, Danny watches Steve’s face. “Feels weird, doesn’t it?”

Before Steve can answer, there’s a quiet rap on their door. He glances at his phone. “Twenty minutes, huh? The great Hetty Lange can be wrong, let the record show.”

“That, or the agent drives super fast.”

 _Or they’re desperate_ , Steve thinks. He knows he doesn’t need his gun, and now he keeps it upstairs in his closet safety deposit box, but if their agent was pursued, this won’t be pretty. Hetty reassured him, during a long phone call one night when he called in an anxious rush, that no agent would ever be sent to their safe house unless the threat was over. They were to come for healing and rest only, not protection. Steve had made it clear their days of violence and bloodshed are over, which she respected at once.

This doesn’t stop years of instincts from breaching the surface of Steve’s thoughts. He catalogues anything that could be a useful weapon in a pinch. Danny too, he sees out of the corner of his eye, is tense in preparation of springing to his feet. Not that anybody barging in would get that far.

As it turns out, Sam Hanna himself is their first house guest. Steve blinks when he opens the door.

“Hey, man. Come on in.”

Steve steps aside the moment he sees both him and Callen on the stoop, not so much out of haste to let them in than to give Sam space. Out of solidarity for the bloody fresco that is Sam’s face and that cornered-animal darkness in his eye. Sam doesn’t look afraid, no. He looks _wild._ A guarded, ready-to-kill-someone wild. It’s a far cry from the smiling man who ate shrimp pasta with them a month ago, all laughs.

Sam eyes the room a beat longer than he normally would. Callen, interesting enough, doesn’t take initiative by stepping inside. He waits for Sam to make the first move.

Then Sam’s boot—also a mess—makes it over the threshold. Bruises ring both eyes, his knuckles are cracked open, bleeding, and gauges have opened up along his cheeks and right temple that will need stitches. Dirt lathers nearly every inch of his clothes, shoulder of his jacket ripped almost clean off. Steve ponders how many other injuries are hiding under them.

“Someone attacked my boat,” Sam says, soft in the way a very sharp blade feels until the pain hits. He squares his shoulders in a visible effort to look human and less like a walking weapon.

 _“I can see that,”_ Steve almost says, before shaking his head. “Sorry, man.”

Callen is much better off, with only an ugly fabric burn along his neck like someone yanked him around by his shirt collar. He nods to Steve’s unspoken question. “We caught him. But our drug cartel leader has friends and we want to give it a night before Sam goes home.”

“Please, sit down.” Steve knows if tries to touch Sam he’ll lose his hand, but he points to the recliner and waits for Sam to drop heavily in it. “I’ll go grab the first aid kit.”

He runs to the downstairs bathroom and back in record time. Callen and Danny chat in murmured tones while Sam stares out at the waves. A vein flutters in his neck.

Steve looks between each person present and hands the bulky field kit to Callen. Nobody else will ever be allowed to get close enough except his partner. It’s a tale as old as their profession and Steve sees himself in the thousand-yard stare, the stiffness that would be present on his own body were anyone but Danny to approach him like this.

Danny, for his part, is perhaps the wisest of them all in this situation.

Others, those who haven’t seen this type of crisis before, would flurry around Sam and start talking. Would be hypervigilant for how to help, fussing. But Danny doesn’t budge an inch, as if beaten federal agents still knotted with adrenaline make for a normal day.

He stays upside down and restarts the game. And wonder of wonders—the game’s childish chirps and music seem to convince Sam he’s not about to be shot at any moment. It’s a testament to how left field the agents’ lives are that neither of them gives Danny’s bizarre sitting arrangement a second look.

Callen’s patching up of Sam is both methodical and swift. He says everything he’s about to do before touching Sam. While he finishes the last impressive row of stitches on his hand—eighteen, total, and by far the longest cut—Steve places a bottle of T3 next to Sam on the arm rest. There’s also a cup of lemongrass tea for Callen and the slight scratch in his abused vocal cords.

“They’ll help,” says Steve at Sam’s caged look. “No sense being in pain for the rest of the day. Then you’ll never sleep, and that’s what your body needs most right now.”

Sam nods, weary all of a sudden. “Thanks, Steve. Sorry to crash without some warning.”

“That’s what we’re here for.” Danny pipes up for the first time. “Plus, we’re about to unleash Steve’s hellfire cooking on you for supper. So. Tit for tat.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Says the man who forgets to eat.”

“Maybe just I don’t like eating your burned lasagna. Ever think about that?”

“For the last time, I’m not even going to attempt Clara’s specialty. You will take the McGarrett family lasagna recipe and be happy about it.”

Callen smiles at the interaction and tapes off a bandage around Sam’s knuckles. “There. That’s the best I can do, big guy.”

They exchange some words, too sotto voce for Steve to hear, and then Callen squeezes Sam’s good hand before getting up. Granting Sam some space as best he can in their quest to calm down. He sits next to Danny on the couch, though right side up, mug of tea nestled in his hands.

“What’s new, Williams?”

Danny quirks a brow. “Oh, you know. The usual. We might live next door to an evil genius or a hacker. Jury’s out.”

“That’s fun.”

“It sure is. Especially when said teenager likes cinnabuns.”

Callen doesn’t bat an eye at the information. “Whatcha playing?”

Danny flicks the Switch to one side. “A game my son is into— _Celeste_. Can’t seem to beat this level.”

“I’d help you but…” Callen shrugs, taking the sandwich off Danny’s chest and sniffing at it. He nibbles a few bites. “I had a weird childhood that didn’t include video games.”

“Understatement of the year,” Sam mutters with his eyes closed.

Callen answers with his mouth full of roast beef. “No comments from the possibly-concussed peanut gallery.”

Sam relaxes for the first time since he got in the door, sinking deeper into the cushions. After swigging back a mouthful of water and a few tablets, lines of pain around his eyes grow shallow. The sound of Danny and Callen babbling to each other about childhood toys is as good a lullaby as any of them could ask for. Sam is out like a light, the T3 and subsequent absence of pain draining him even before Steve can track down a blanket long enough for the tall man.

* * *

That night, Steve sleeps in his own bed just so he can keep an ear on Sam across the hall. They’ve already done a few concussion checks and he’s cleared. Callen took his leave before supper with a determined look in his eye, presumably to do recon at Sam’s boat house or possibly to go smash in some skulls. Steve isn’t sure which and he doesn’t want to find out.

For how harrowing it is to see on someone else’s face, Steve knows the look. He’s seen it before in the mirror after someone hurt his family too. There’s a macabre comfort in it, even for a competent man like Sam.

Steve is just about ready to drift off when the soft _pad, pad, pad_ of footsteps ascend the staircase and hover at his door.

It can’t be Sam, who is both down for the count and much too mountainous for such a light tread. That leaves only Callen—certainly well trained enough to move with soundless dexterity, a vapour on a bad day—but even he can’t break into the locked house without an alert, which leaves…

Steve lets out a relieved breath when a familiar hand wanders around the bed and his face, lost in the dark. He’d know these gun callouses anywhere. It rinses him with a mix of emotions to feel how much those callouses have faded since their retirement.

Hands now used for healing and not violence, not ever again if they don’t want.

“Steve?”

“Where else would I be?” he whispers. But Steve circles a thumb over Danny’s cheekbone to show he’s teasing. “You okay?”

Danny has never done this before either, seeking Steve out at night in his own room, and after the day they’ve had, it raises a different kind of alarm bell in Steve’s head. He’s reminded of the hammock incident, the way Danny had curled against him like the only safe harbour in a tempest.

With his eyes more adjusted to the dark, Steve tries to see if Danny is upset or scared. The minutia in each shift of his eye and the lines on his face. He knows them with equal alacrity. They’re relaxed enough, though there’s a wry tilt on one side of Danny’s lips.

Danny uses Steve’s touch to find where he is. Then he crawls under the covers and breathes out his own sigh. “For once, it’s all your fault. You’ve ruined me.”

“Oh? What’s the daily Williams complaint this time?”

“The fact I can’t sleep unless your freakishly long arms are nearby.”

Steve blinks. “My arms…?”

Then Steve hears what he’s really saying and the tacit words are a geyser behind his eyes. Something tinsel shatters, the last glass bastille between them. Steve thinks about the phone call with Tani, how close he came to not having any of this. Any of Danny.

This time, Steve doesn’t have to bundle him close at all.

For the first time—Danny reaches for _him_.

One arm bandies across his chest, the other reaching back for Steve’s right hand. They’re shorter arms than Steve’s, evidenced by how his wraps around Danny’s back, to his sternum, with room to spare.

The back of his right hand, trapped by Danny’s serpentine grip, rests against the skin of his partner’s stomach.

_Th-thump…th-thump…th-thump…_

Steve watches Danny fall asleep and yeah, he’s got a lot to learn—but maybe they can teach other. He’s looking forward to it.

* * *

The next morning, Danny is actually up and awake before Steve. He bustles around the kitchen preparing a full continental breakfast for their convalescing guest. Steve wanders in and takes a moment just to appreciate the laden countertops and abundance of freshly cut fruit, how alert Danny seems.

“This might become a therapeutic thing for you.”

Danny pauses in cooking eggs. He squints at Steve.

Steve filches a piece of bacon out of the adjacent pan. “Having people to mother hen all the time, you know?”

“Whatever you say, Steve.”

When Sam comes down thirty minutes later and tries to help with the cooking, Danny promptly shoos him out of the kitchen. He pushes at Sam’s shoulders—and he has to stretch to do so—until the agent shuffles away from the stove. It makes for a hilarious sight, especially considering Sam is taller even than Steve and almost a foot taller than Danny, built in a way that would put a small tank to shame. He could probably pick Danny up by his scruff in one hand but he doesn’t, sufficiently cowed by the man’s ire that he lets Danny shove him around.

Steve takes a picture of the moment and it looks nothing so much like a terrier barking at a great dane.

Sam sits next to Steve at the island with a wondering stare. “He’s pushy.”

“You learn to love it.” Steve scans the nascent bruising along Sam’s eyes, the burst blood vessels in his sclera, and a particularly nasty weal along his brow. “How are you feeling?”

“Vasquez gave me a good beating.” Sam takes in a breath, bracing himself against the inevitable pain this must cause his equally bruised chest, before sighing it out. He’d shot down the idea of a hospital visit, and Steve privately revisits whether he should go. “But I’ve had worse.”

“Was this a revenge thing?” Steve asks. “You busted him on a case, I’m guessing.”

Sam’s expression turns dry. “Let’s just say I’m lucky nothing is broken except a rib or two.”

“Ouch. Been there, done that.” Danny sets a mammoth plate of eggs, sausage, bacon, and fruit in front of Sam. “Eat up. I’ve got seconds if you want ‘em.”

“I appreciate it, Danny,” says Sam. Probably because, man, can he _eat._ He picks up a fork in his non-bandaged hand. “You didn’t have to go all out. I’m fine, really.”

“Oh yes, I did. Steve never appreciates my eggs. It’s nice to have someone around with good taste.”

Steve is about to banter back…when he notices something else on the corner of Sam’s plate. His eyes widen. “Are you sure—”

“Ssshhh.”

“Danny…”

“You’ll be fine, Julia Child. Just go with it.”

Sam glances up from scarfing a bite of toast, as if suddenly doubting the sanity of his hosts. Steve and Danny eagerly watch Sam chew, staring at him with greater concentration than some suspects they’ve interrogated. Danny’s second round of sausage is burning and he doesn’t even notice.

Sam looks almost defensive after he swallows. “What’s your deal? It’s just white bread.”

“Yes!” Steve pumps his arm and high-fives a beaming Danny. “Victory at last.”

“Knew you could do it, babe.”

“No you didn’t,” Steve protests. “What is this? You were ready to bail me out constantly.”

“Because I didn’t want you to poison anybody, me included.”

Sam must catch on because he waves the toast at Steve. “It’s good bread, man. I’ll eat your baking anytime.”

Danny snorts and sets out another plate in front of Steve. “Great, you’re fueling the monster. I’ll be hearing about this for weeks, just you wait.”

“Thanks, brother.” Steve pats Sam’s burly shoulder, mindful of all the bandages. “Fifteenth try is the charm.”

With a studied gaze, Sam switches it between Steve, guzzling his own breakfast, to Danny who hasn’t touched the food. He frowns and Steve catches his eye. He’s so used to Danny’s sparrow-like eating habits, cautious and intentional, that to realize someone else can pick up on it so quickly is gratifying.

But then, if anyone would empathize with the struggle, it’s Sam. Callen still eats at strange hours, and in his younger years he didn’t eat much at all. They both know what it’s like to have constant worry for a partner.

“You know,” says Sam. His nonchalance is so reassuring and believable it puts even Steve at ease. He cleans his hands on one of Isabelle’s gifted decorative napkins. “During our team meals, we don’t dig in until everyone is seated and ready. Together.”

“I’m good, buddy.” Danny doesn’t turn around while he says it, salvaging his sausage.

Sam smirks and Steve gets ready for the big guns. “I’ll eat all of those seconds if you have some too.”

Danny fumbles in soaking the pan. He whirls around. His attention is wide eyed and unblinking on Sam, for this is no small task, with the army’s worth of food currently drowning their kitchen counter space. “All of them?”

“Every last bite.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch, you just gotta eat.”

Danny finally blinks, leaning back on his heels. “You promise?”

“On my honour as a SEAL.”

Steve’s fork stops halfway to his mouth in surprise. It’s a hefty trump card and intelligent in its choice. Sam is just as good of an investigative agent as he is a Navy man.

And what do you know—Danny pulls over one of the dining room chairs and sits down without another word. He dishes up some eggs and a piece of Steve’s toast, along with a few slices of mango. It’s a homely thing, the simple sight of them all eating breakfast at the island together, men who’ve survived unspeakable horrors now lined with peace and hope.

 _We’ve overcome._ The realization pours out in real time, a gloopy balm over Steve’s soul. Soaking the cracks and watering ashy places that he’s long stopped attempting to cultivate. Perhaps it’s time he did. _We made it._

Danny glances at him. “What?”

“Nothing.” Steve notices he’s still gawking, bright eyed, and recovers himself. He watches Danny polish off the eggs. “Nothing at all. They’re good, Danno.”

The man smiles. “Even burned?”

“Even burned,” says Steve, not bothering to censor his affection. “They’re becoming my favourite.”

Sam considers Steve and Danny with something weighted. “You know…me too.”

* * *

When Steve wakes up from an afternoon doze in the living room, Sam has already packed and left. But there are two new additions that weren’t present when he laid down:

Danny, for one, who somehow managed to worm his way in between Steve and the back of the couch. They’re tangled up in each other, courtesy of Steve pulling Danny close even in his sleep. Danny has an arm curled around his own cheek where it rests on Steve’s chest.

And secondly—

“Love you, S’eve.” Danny’s not even awake, stumbling out the words as easily as he breathes. How far they’ve come even since June.

Steve reaches over the back of the couch to tug a waffle throw over them both. His lips press in Danny’s hair. “Love you too, Danno. Go back to sleep.”

—On the coffee table sits a white, origami sea turtle.


End file.
